Is Education Minister Paul Givan “punishing poverty and rewarding wealth”?

In his column in today’s Irish News, Chris Donnelly brings up the controversial RAISE programme, a new initiative to “raise achievement to reduce educational disadvantage”. It’s a £20 million pound programme running over two years. From his column:

The DUP education minister, Paul Givan, has courted controversy by introducing new eligibility criteria to identify participating schools which includes fee-paying schools in Lisburn and two-thirds of grammar schools whilst excluding many schools with high percentages of poor pupils in both the primary and post-primary sector.

The minister has been at pains to point out that the new programme will be a central plank in his strategy to improve school attendances.

During the week, the Department of Education produced statistics confirming that west Belfast is the worst constituency in the north for school absence rates, with more than one third of all primary pupils in the area recording ‘chronic’ (missing one day a fortnight) or ‘severe chronic’ (missing one day a week) absence rates, with north Belfast a close second.

A significant number of schools in both of these constituencies have been excluded from involvement in the Raise programme. The minister’s home constituency of Lagan Valley recorded the highest rates of pupil school attendance in 2022/23 and was a close second to Fermanagh and South Tyrone last year, the opposite end of the spectrum to inner north and west Belfast.

Meanwhile, the minister decided to launch the programme last week in a school in the heart of his own constituency, alongside his education counterpart in Dublin, Norma Foley. In the south, underachievement is tackled through the DEIS initiative which strategically invests additional resources and funds into schools based in deprived local communities across the state.

That approach has been rejected under the DUP minister. In the Department of Education’s own publication outlining the Raise programme, it was confirmed that the indicative number of pupils being supported through Raise in Lisburn is 50% more than for the whole of west Belfast.

The principal of Bunscoil an tSleibhe Dhuibh, Pilib Misteil, has claimed the education minister is “punishing poverty and rewarding wealth”. It is hard to argue with him.

There is more background in Chris’s column from two weeks ago:

The new DUP minister abandoned the respected and long-established means of identifying school communities most at risk of underachievement – ie those schools with the highest percentage of poor pupils on their enrolment – and replaced it with a convoluted new formula for determining eligible schools to receive funds via RAISE which has led to two-thirds of all grammar schools being deemed eligible whilst some schools in working class communities like Ballymurphy, Turf Lodge and Andersonstown are excluded.

The most recently published exam results (2022/23) for the north illustrate how just 56.5% of our poor kids (those deemed eligible to receive free school meals) passed five good GCSEs, with more than 82% of those not entitled to receive free dinners jumping this hurdle, confirming that relative poverty remains the biggest factor determining underachievement.

There seem to be questions about this scheme that need to be answered. The Irish Government is partly funding the scheme, so you would expect them to be interested in how their money and our tax money are being spent.

I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism, I am not a member of any political party. Oddly for a member of the Slugger team, I am not that interested in daily politics, preferring to write about big ideas in society. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.