When our Minister for Education, Paul Givan, was gifted £20 million of funding from the Republic’s Shared Investment Programme ‘RAISE’, it should have provided a golden opportunity for addressing one of the principal causes of educational disadvantage – poverty. Instead he devised a bizarre formula for distributing the funds and one which prioritises privilege.
We need be in no doubt about the significance of child poverty. According to the Northern Ireland Poverty and Income Inequality Report (2022/23 ) the percentage of children living in poverty in 2022 – 2023 was 24% ; compared to 18% in 2021. Between April 2023 and March 2024 food banks distributed 90,375 emergency parcels , including 60,831 for children. This represents an11% increase from last year and a 143% increase compared to the same period five years ago.
It isn’t rocket science – that £20 million needed to go to those schools that have the highest concentrations of poverty and disadvantage. There was an obvious and straightforward way of ensuring that allocations of funding met that objective and that is via the ‘free school meals criteria’, a tried and tested method generally accepted as fair.
The question must arise as to why Givan scorned that approach and in favour of a much more complex and untried one. The only possible conclusion is that he wished to assist schools that fell well outside any reasonable definition of disadvantage.
Using that ‘free school meals’ criteria we can readily identify where disadvantage actually lies, thus the average free school meals percentage for secondary schools is 35% and 20% of our secondary schools have 50% or more of their pupils on the free meals register. By contrast the average free school meals percentage for grammar schools is just 13%.
The injustice of the Minister’s alternative criteria is starkly revealed when we discover that he intended to assist two thirds of grammar schools which apart from their low percentage of free school meal recipients are generally better resourced anyway. Amongst these the following with 9% or less in free school meals were scheduled for assistance; Bangor Grammar, Victoria College , Ballymena Academy , St. Louis Grammar and Aquinas.
Meanwhile some schools with very high free school meal percentages were not included for support. Amongst them were West Winds Primary in Newtownards (71%) and Holy Cross in Strabane (35.3%). Yet Whiteabbey Primary (4%) is deemed eligible for funding. Most ridiculous of all Wallace High Preparatory in Lisburn which charges £5,000 a year for what is private education was also deemed eligible.
One further question does have to arise in this context. What advice did civil servants give the minister or did they merely give him a bye ball? If the latter they were derelict in their duty. One must also wonder how the government in the Republic must feel about this misuse of their generous funding.
Of course the unveiling of the proposed programme led to widespread disbelief and anger. We were then assured that it was merely ‘a draft’, but the approach has been so fundamentally flawed that a mere re-draft will not suffice.
Reclaim the Enlightenment welcomes the fact that the Assembly took this view when they voted 46-22 on 5 November in favour of a resolution entitled ‘Failure of RAISE disadvantage programme in tackling educational underachievement’ . In detail they regretted that ‘the RAISE programme’s eligibility formula excludes many schools in some of the most deprived working class communities; further regrets that, by design, this programme will not deliver based on objective need.’
Crucially the resolution then continued by calling on the Minister ‘to replace the RAISE programme with a new programme which will target support to the schools and children that, based on objective evidence, need it most.’
Although five Unionists voted in favour of the motion it is a matter of regret that all others voted against. The misapplication of funding which should mitigate disadvantage affects all sections of the community and is therefore not an issue on which there should be any communal division. Unionist MLA’s have understandably expressed particular concerns about the effects of disadvantage for Protestant working-class children. Those who voted against should think again about their Minister’s approach which utterly failed to address this issue.
Reclaim the Enlightenment is a charity founded in 2017. It has had a particular focus on education and its Education Reform Group organised a major conference in November 2023 the proceedings of which were published as Is Our Education System Failing Our Children which was launched at a second conference in May 2024. The Group is currently campaigning against selection at 11.
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