WHEN I was in England, recently, at a graduation ceremony, the scope and sweep of those who will enter the millennium, degree in hand, and those just enrolled, who will be the educated children of the year 2,000, sent ripples of pleasure up this Northern-educated spine.

The British education system is quite simply far ahead of our. Some of the new universities there are making deliberate and strenuous efforts to bring people in from the margins. The year’s crop at Staffordshire University yielded a rich harvest of people young and old, black, white and brown, of all religions and none, of both genders, able-bodied and disabled.

It is no accident that the vice-chancellor of the University is the feminist Christine King – one of only six female vice-chancellors in the UK.

Mature students, women and those from an ethnic background who would not pass Norman Tebbitt’s infamous cricket test are made especially welcome at Staffordshire and are clearly at home there.

It was no bother at all to the University to hire a small ground-to-platform elevator at £1,000 per day for those who came to their graduation in wheelchairs and would otherwise have been denied the magic moment of strutting their stuff on stage like everybody else. No bother, but a great expense, and, to a University with a radical edge, worth every thousand. There are six such elevators permanently installed elsewhere on campus lecture rooms, through thoughtful effort on the part of the University.

We only have to think of former Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald’s wife Joan, making her way in a wheelchair over obstacle courses to attend affairs of state, to wince at how little insulting heed we have paid in this Republic to people in need. It never occurred to the authorities to rise to the occasion. Ms Fitzgerald, whose incisive and wide-ranging intelligence would have been an asset anywhere, anytime, had to bow out of many events where her presence might have convinced visiting guests that Ireland was a fast-changing society and that the corridors of power were not exclusively reserved to men.

race relations

Wheelchair-bound people are welcome at Staffordshire, where provision is made for twenty-four-hours-a-day helpers. Working-class women have abandoned the kitchen in droves for a university which considers it perfectly natural that a mother should combine home with academia. First generation British-born students whose parents arrived in Britain from India, Pakistan, and Africa come from all over the United Kingdom to study in the town of Stoke-on-Trent. There are loads of people from the North and the Republic, and a vibrant Irish studies course there in case they feel homesick.

There are, of course, problems. Marital difficulties have been reported for women whose husbands could not cope with a newly-educated feisty spouse; race relations are not entirely smooth. The university takes special measures to help people adapt – a newly-introduced feature of education there is the appointment of students from second, third and fourth years as mentors to freshers during their first year. The mentors are given certificates which the authorities have shrewdly judged will stand to them on their CVs when they apply for jobs – well-honed interpersonal skills are much in demand in the tumultuous world that labour relations have become.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we won’t let immigrants awaiting their papers take up menial jobs. People of colour are being assaulted. The female academic staff of University College, Dublin have been obliged to lodge an anti-discrimination suit regarding promotion, and female staff in other universities are about to follow. And the powers that be in this land continue to wring their allegedly helpless hands at the absence of working-class people from third-level education.

The problem here is not just one of money. In Britain, the highest grant for students from the lowest income group is a mere two thousand pounds. Over there, students have to work part-time and take on overdrafts to pay their way through school.

One crucial difference between Britain and Ireland, as exemplified by Staffordshire University, is the can-do attitude of the authorities. They believe students from the margins can and will manage. They actively open their doors, coax them in and apply management minds to the problem of how best to help students cope with such difficulties as they will assuredly encounter.

In Staffordshire, also, it’s not solely a matter of educating people for work. They take pleasure in just giving people the opportunity to open their minds, spread their wings and take imaginative flight, regardless of gender, colour or age. It’s called education for all. It’s absent here.