Using GIS to analyse early years provision in Northern Ireland – adding another year of segregated education?

Figures & data

Table 1. Funded early years enrolments 2018/2019. Source: DENI (2019b).

Settings	Management	Numbers of units	Numbers of pupils	Protestant	Catholic
Pre-school centres with funded places (Playgroups and Day Nurseries)	Voluntary	331	6893	1783	3349
	Private	55	1129	373	323
Nursery schools	Controlled	64	4111	1833	1234
	Catholic Maintained	31	1721	32	1475
Funded Nursery Units in primary schools	Controlled	119	4531	2286*	556*
	Catholic Maintained	90	3899	62*	3682*
	Other Maintained	16	473	39*	386*
	Controlled Integrated	4	103	33*	48*
	Grant Maintained Integrated	16	548	154*	211*
Primary schools with funded Reception Classes	Controlled	13	46
	Catholic Maintained	29	105
	Controlled Integrated	2	17
TOTAL		771**	23,576

Notes. *These figures include Reception.

**The subtotals do not add up as some schools have both Reception and Nursery classes.

Figure 1. Segregation scores for pre-school settings (2018–19).

Figure 2. Segregation scores for primary schools in Northern Ireland (2018–19).

Table 2. Average segregation scores for pre-schools (and sub-sets), primary schools and census small areas.

Dataset	Mean	Median
Pre-schools	0.73	0.85
Primary schools	0.88	0.97
Co-located pre-schools	0.82	1.0
Pre-schools ≥ 150 m from primary school	0.70	0.76
Playgroups within a school	0.81	1.0
Playgroups not within a school	0.70	0.76
Primary schools with co-located pre-school	0.88	0.97
Census Small Areas	0.65	0.74

Figure 3. Segregation in Census Small Areas and pre-schools (all maps to same scale).

Table 3. Segregation by settlement category: average scores and percentage of pre-schools with higher or unrepresentative segregation (more segregated than the Small Area population, or majority of pupils from the ‘minority’ community for that location).

Settlement classification	Small Area (mean/median)	Pre-school (mean/median)	Pre-schools more segregated (%)
Belfast City	0.72/0.81	0.81/1.0	71
Derry City	0.82/0.94	0.92/1.0	73
Large Town (population > 18000)	0.68/0.77	0.71/0.85	70
Medium Town (10,000–18,000)	0.51/0.51	0.63/0.74	53
Small Town (5,000–9,999)	0.62/0.70	0.68/0.66	63
Intermediate Settlements (2,500–4,999)	0.69/0.80	0.67/0.81	68
Village (1,000–2,499)	0.64/0.73	0.57/0.61	53
Open countryside and villages < 1,000	0.59/0.65	0.77/0.93	70

DENI. (2019b). Second sure start evaluation report. https://www.etini.gov.uk/publications/second-sure-start-evaluation-report

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