The Accord Coalition has urged that lessons be learned from Northern Ireland’s sectarian education system following a call at the weekend from Peter Robinson, Northern Ireland’s First Minister and leader of the Democrat Unionist Party, for children to attend shared schools. Currently 95% of the country’s pupils attend either a Catholic or notionally Protestant school.
Chair of the Accord Coalition, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain MBE said ‘Single-faith schools have certainly not created all of Northern Ireland’s sectarian problems, but they do help perpetuate them by allowing children from different backgrounds to grow up apart from each other, serving to create environments where mistrust between groups more readily grows.
‘Peter Robinson’s call for Protestant and Catholic children in Northern Ireland to attend the same schools and thereby end the “them and us” culture has lessons for Great Britain. We do not want our wonderfully multi-faith society to become multi-fractious, nor for children in the next generation grow up as strangers to each other.
‘Mixed schooling has a very positive effect upon the growth of mutual understanding. Rather than encouraging division by segregating children on the grounds of belief, all parts of the UK should implement an integrated school system, where those of all faiths and none attend together, learn about each other and mix socially every day.’
Notes
Among the key findings of ‘Social Capital, Diversity and Education Policy’, by Professor Irene Bruegel of the London South Bank University Families & Social Capital ESRC Research Group (2006) were that “Friendship at primary schools can, and does, cross ethnic and faith divides wherever children have the opportunity to make friends from different backgrounds. At that age, in such schools, children are not highly conscious of racial differences and are largely unaware of the religion of their friends … There was some evidence that parents learned to respect people from other backgrounds as a result of their children’s experiences in mixed schools.” (p2)
‘Identities in Transition: A Longitudinal Study of Immigrant Children’, by Rupert Brown, Adam Rutland & Charles Watters from the Universities of Sussex and Kent (2008) found that “… the effects of school diversity were consistent, most evidently on social relations: higher self-esteem, fewer peer problems and more cross-group friendships. Such findings show that school ethnic composition can significantly affect the promotion of positive intergroup attitudes. These findings speak against policies promoting single faith schools, since such policies are likely to lead to reduced ethnic diversity in schools.”(p9)
