Suffer little children
Nobody’s talking about how most of the North’s children are being sidelined by the St Andrew’s agreement.
Eamonn McCann, 30 Jan 2007
There’s no end of talk in the North about the St. Andrews deal being a sell-out, although there’s sharp disagreement about who or what’s being sold out.
However, the sell-out of children is scarcely anywhere mentioned.
If the deal goes through and a new Assembly meets in March, the system will be preserved whereby two thirds of the North’s children, including a huge majority of the children of the poor, will be deemed failures and hobbled for life.
At the moment, the 11-plus examination divides children according to “academic ability,” sending about one third to grammar schools, the rest to secondary schools. In the North, as everywhere, selection by “ability” has meant, in practice, selection by social class. The vast majority at grammar schools comes from non-manual working backgrounds. A substantial majority in secondary schools are from manual backgrounds. By far the most reliable indicator of which children will pass the 11-plus is whether they have been receiving free school meals at primary school.
To his great credit, Martin McGuinness’s last act as Education Minister before the power-sharing Executive collapsed in November 2002 was to announce the end of the 11-plus and of academic selection. The battle to “Save Our Grammar Schools” has been raging since, vociferously led by the DUP. At St. Andrews in October, Ian Paisley got his way.
After much prevarication, New Labour, in June last year, legislated to put McGuinness’s initiative into practice. The Education (NI) Order, 2006, was brought before the Commons, and passed. A month later, it went through the Lords. And that, most people in the North assumed, despite the chagrin of the grammar lobby and DUP anger, was that.
It speedily emerged, however, that Dr. Paisley was using “defence of the grammar schools” as a bargaining chip in the ongoing negotiations on a restoration of Stormont. And Tony Blair instantly ditched long-standing Labour principles to do business on this basis.
Thus, Direct Rule ministers found themselves explaining that they felt passionately about equality in education while simultaneously promising to forget the whole idea if only Paisley would sign up to power-sharing.
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