OPINION: An expanded Magee is the missing piece of the Civil Rights legacy

It was Colum, as today’s leader of the SDLP, who successfully demanded that the expansion of Magee to 10,000 students be included in the New Decade, New Approach deal.

The commitment to expanding Magee makes sense. The expansion of university provision in Derry will transform the city as the construction, retail and service sectors feel the benefit and the jobs. But Magee provides the type of courses that will also transform the city in other ways, too. Those courses include artificial intelligence, robotics, data analytics and personalised medicine – creating the right treatment for the right patient, using data analytics. This would provide the new industrial base our city so desperately needs.

I know and understand the anger felt about Ulster University, for not delivering expansion sooner and for not planning for Magee’s expansion years ago. But it needs to be said that we have had a devolved Executive for years, in which other parties failed to provide the resources needed to expand university numbers. The result is that we export a complete university intake of students away from Northern Ireland every year.

Ulster University has the chance in the next few weeks to prove its commitment to Derry and Magee. Allied health courses are being moved out of its Jordanstown campus in Greater Belfast. If those courses do not come to Magee then the basis of Ulster University’s role in the Derry City and Strabane City Deal will be questioned.

The development of Magee is one aspect of a broader need to improve skills. Across Northern Ireland we need to improve skills to enable our local businesses to expand and employ more people and to attract more businesses from elsewhere. We must also support local people in setting up their own businesses.

Our current education system is weighted against pupils from low income backgrounds – they are less likely to go to the highest performing schools, less likely to go to university and less likely to be able to afford to go to university in Great Britain or the Republic. We are failing too many pupils from low income backgrounds.

We need to ensure every pupil has the right to a good education, good skills and a good career. For that to happen we need to shake-up our skills system, by having enough university places to meet demand, to have a full sized university in Derry and to give teenage school pupils the option of vocational skills training, and later apprenticeships.

There is still a long way to achieve this goal. But I am determined to play my part in making sure this happens.