United school system would have saved us £1.25bn since Good Friday Agreement Derry integrationist Colm Cavanagh tells Stormont Education Committee

The long-standing campaigner for integrated education told MLAs legislation should be enacted to force the Executive to pursue a united system.

Mr. Cavanagh, co-author with Professor Margaret Topping, of an independent review of integrated education, made the remarks at the Stormont Education Committee.

He pointed to two reports - one by Deloitte in 2007, the other by Ulster University in 2016 - that highlighted the significant costs of duplication across multiple sectors.

“They are both in the fifty millions and if you take the median cost between the two of them then you are talking £57.25m every year. That’s only two or three per cent of your budget for the Department of Education, but if you total that up since 1998 and the Belfast Agreement then you are talking about £1.25 billion so the demands that you have on your resources all the time, part of the reason for that demand is spending a lot of money running parallel systems,” he said.

Mr. Cavanagh said creating a united school system would help realise the goal of reconciliation set out in the GFA and its successor accords.

“Psychologists and sociologists tell us that if we divide a group then we automatically lay the foundations for rivalry and competition, envy, jealousy and friction and even worse as we know in Northern Ireland. You create a ‘them and us’ situation,” he observed.

The veteran integrationist said there had been a number of false dawns on the road to a united system over the past 190 years.

The Catholic Church was in favour of a 1831 proposal by the then Chief Secretary for Ireland Edward Stanley to limit denominational teaching under a national school system.

This, said Mr. Cavanagh, was blocked by the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church, both of which wanted their own schools and this resulted in a separate Catholic school system being created.

“So we had a denominational school system from the 1840s for the rest of the century,” he said.

Mr. Cavanagh went on to relate how in 1923 the north’s first Minister of Education Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart had introduced legislation banning denominational education during school hours but this was repealed in 1925 following pressure from some of the Protestant churches.

More recently the first power-sharing executive had integrated education in its programme for government in 1974 but got nowhere. “Three times - the Whig government in the 1830s, the unionist government in the 1920s and a power-sharing government in the 1920s have all tried to do it and all failed,” he said.

Mr. Cavanagh said that the integrated education movement has since made great strides and attitudes were changing. He told the committee: “The Derry Journal in 1977 had an editorial severely criticising nationalist councillors for not defending Catholic schools. That was 1977.

“In 2016, subsequently, they are now saying that children should all go to the same schools. That would be an indication of the change in public opinion.”