ISOLATED TOGETHER: PROXIMAL PAIRS OF PRIMARY SCHOOLS DUPLICATING PROVISION IN NORTHERN IRELAND

ABSTRACT

Divided societies emerging from conflict are found around the globe, and these divisions can cause, and may be perpetuated by, disunity in educational provision. Establishing sound and equitable education is considered vital in promoting reconciliation in places with apparently intractable conflict. Northern Ireland was involved in ethno-sectarian violence for 30 years. Society there is still fundamentally divided and there is considerable duplication of services supplying the needs of each community. This is true also of education with multiple schools each catering for ‘their own’ population. Sometimes these can be too small to be sustainable and/or may be inefficient. In this research GIS analysis is used to identify 32 pairs of primary schools and their levels of sustainability are estimated, alongside some additional cost of the duplication, although this can be difficult to quantify. Bringing schools together in a society emerging from conflict will not be easy for communities. However, economic costs may drive difficult structural change. Perhaps an even more important driver, in addition to financial costs, is the less tangible but even more important costs to future social cohesion should separation continue.

Keywords:

• divided societies
• rural schools
• sustainability
• duplication
• Northern Ireland
• isolated schools

Disclosure Statement

The authors declared no financial interest or benefit to them arising from this research.

Geolocation Information

Northern Ireland Latitude: +54.6 Longitude: −6.5

Notes

1. The justification was that schools under the same management authority (Education Authority for Controlled Schools and Council for the Catholic Maintained Sector for Maintained schools) will already have rationalised, where possible, duplicate schools, but that schools under different management authorities may not have been rationalised vis-à-vis each other.

2. While many sources suggest that less that 2 miles may be more representative (see DfT, 2014 and Owen et al., 2012), Kelly and Fu (2014) cite 4.88 km (3.03 miles) as the average travel distance for Irish primary school pupils.

3. There are four anomalous Controlled Primaries with 10% or more Catholic learners, most in locations close to the border with the Republic of Ireland. This is often a consequence of selective population migration from these areas.

4. This is not an unproblematic source. School websites may not be up-to-date or reliable for this type of information. Additionally, larger schools generally have websites while a few very small schools do not.

5. School budgets are published each year providing details of the overall funding made available to each school (Department of Education Northern Ireland (DENI), n.d.). For this exercise a comparison was made between the combined funding of isolated pairs of schools compared to average funding to five schools with the same overall enrolment.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Integrated Education Fund, Community Relations Northern Ireland and the UNESCO Centre, Ulster University, as part of Ulster University’s Transforming Education project;Integrated Education Fund; Community Foundation Northern Ireland.