A Response to John Fitzgerald - Give our Schools in Northern Ireland a break

John Fitzgerald's article can be found here.

It is highly unusual that an article bemuses, exercises and frustrates me to the point where I feel the need to put pen to paper - or finger to keyboard - in order to respond.  John Fitzgerald from the Irish Times has succeeded in doing just that following publication of his article entitled 'North's poor education system a recipe for failure'.

In the article, Mr Fitzgerald headlines a supposed fact that "21% of 30-34 year olds have not completed post-primary education, the highest in any UK region". He doesn't clarify what this means - whether these people left school before the age of 16 or whether they did not obtain any qualifications, or indeed something else. At any rate, nobody is in any doubt that raising levels of achievement is a key priority for our education system in Northern Ireland. In a previous article, I have raised concern that just over 50% of boys in the non-selective sector in Northern Ireland passed GCSE Maths in 2018. Indeed, some months ago I had the privilege of sitting on a panel at a conference which was exploring how organisations and agencies in Northern Ireland could work together in synthesis to raise the performance of boys. I mooted in my article that the so-called 'Revised' Northern Ireland Curriculum has done precious little to improve academic performance. In fact, its misaligned focus on generic skills as part of transferable learning outcomes across subject domains is doing our children a major disservice - more than anything else, in my opinion. More about that later.

However, my concerns with Mr Fitzgerald's article are numerous. Firstly, he assumes a direct link between the higher proportion of selective schools in Northern Ireland and what he refers to as economic and social damage. He writes:

Research by the University of Ulster's Vani Borooah shows how damaging the selective nature of the Northern Ireland education system has been for that economy and society. This outdated selective system of secondary education has resulted in Northern Ireland having the lowest human capital of any UK region.

This very simplistic assumption is - quite simply - misleading. It is quite surprising that Mr Fitzgerald appears to have fallen foul of the correlation - causality fallacy. Whilst it is correct that the selective system in Northern Ireland has been retained much more dominantly than in other parts of these islands, what is absolutely neither correct nor fair is to endeavour to suggest that this is the cause of the admittedly concerning tail of underachievement in Northern Ireland. In fact, what Mr Fitzgerald singularly fails to mention in his article is that Vani Borooah (whom he quotes in his article) and Colin Knox hypothesise in their 2015 paper entitled 'Inequality, segregation and poor performance: the education system in Northern Ireland'  that there are potentially 6 factors which determine the likelihood of a school leaver exiting with 'good' GCSE or 'A' Level passes: gender, religion, recipient of Free School Meals, Special Educational Needs, the management type of the school attended and the nature of the area in which he or she resides. I would be of the opinion that we could add many more factors, not least the value placed on education at home, the curriculum the child is exposed to, and we haven't even touched on the whole genes debate. For the latter, I would strongly recommend David Didau's latest book - Making Kids Cleverer.

Therefore the issue is much more complex than what Mr Fitzgerald endeavours to purport in his article.

I write as someone with 20 years' experience in education in Northern Ireland - 12 years in the selective sector as a teacher, senior leader and Principal in 3 different schools, and 8 years leading a non-selective school as Principal. All, without exception, excellent schools with dedicated, committed and highly professional staff and a wonderful student community. We can hypothesise as much as we want regarding correlation-causation factors which impact upon levels of underachievement, however at the crux of it all is aspiration. It may be the case that there is correlation in that lower-income pupils are less likely to attend a grammar school. It may be the case that there is correlation in the gap between the performance of Free School Meal pupils and other pupils. However that does not lead to causality. Indeed, Borooah hits the nail on the head when he asserts that there was no performance gap between pupils receiving free school meals and their peers in London because they were generally drawn from the new immigrant community who may be poor in income but they are rich in aspiration. Do these pupils in London attend a selective education system? Most probably not.

So if Mr Fitzpatrick is trying to suggest that high performance leading to social mobility is the domain of selective education solely to the detriment of all other pupils, he needs to think again. If anything, his article does a disservice to the hard work and effort of educationalists across Northern Ireland - no matter what the sector - to set the bar high for all our children. In the non-selective school which I led there were a significant number of Protestant boys - the pupils Borooah claims are in danger of underachieving the most significantly. In that non-selective school, the number of boys attaining 5 or more GCSE passes at A*-C rose from 70% to 92% between 2014 and 2017. The number of boys attaining 5 or more passes at A*-C including English and Maths was close to 70% in 2017. The means of achieving high performance doesn't lie in the type of school a child attends, but much more pertinently in how a school engenders, adopts and promotes high aspiration, working with parents and other agencies to ensure this happens. 'No, labels, no limits' was the mantra we adopted at Markethill High, with a clear aspiration that every Year 8 child who walks through the door has the potential - no matter what their ability - to  attain qualifications which will open many doors for them in the future, including higher-level education, should they wish. Every single child completes 7 GCSEs at least, including English and Maths.

The answer lies not in  the type of school a child attends, but rather the aspiration they are exposed to both in school and at home, and the principles adopted to ensure these are maintained - a fit-for-purpose, knowledge-rich curriculum, strong behaviour management, strong relationships between school and home, valuing cultural capital, and consistently high expectation. High standards can be attained by ALL our pupils, and aspiration and social mobility are the domains of ALL our schools, not just the few. I attended a Grammar School and did well. However, I have no doubt - had I attended the non-selective schools I have had the privilege of working in over the years - I would have done equally as well, because aspiration was at the heart of the school's ethos. The education system in Northern Ireland must remain focused on these objectives.

Many schools in Northern Ireland do a great job at promoting these principles. Mr Fitzgerald would have been better served focusing his critique of the Northern Ireland education system on what is really pertinent - the fact that all our schools are facing a budget crisis, the fact that there is a lack of direction from government and educational bodies, the fact that the Northern Ireland curriculum is doing a disservice to the pupils who need a great education most, the fact that teachers here are not given the status they deserve due to ongoing failure to address pay issues and a lack of robust professional development opportunities.

And as for Mr Fitzgerald's praise of the 'high-quality education system' in Scotland? Well, once again Mr Fitzgerald seems to be rather selective with his evidence. Presumably Mr Fitzgerald attests this to the strong comprehensive nature of the Scottish system. Perhaps Mr Fitzgerald would like to read the findings from December of last year which indicate that - in fact - 59% of children from the most deprived areas of Scotland do not reach the expected standards in literacy at the end of primary school, compared with 83% in the most affluent areas. How then, does Mr Fitzgerald stand over his claim that the attainment gap in Northern Ireland is somehow caused by the selective system in this country?

The reality is that - alongside a strong and clear focus on aspiration - Northern Ireland's centralised curriculum needs root-and-branch reform. The best thing that secondary schools can do for their children when they enter the doors is to aim to eradicate the Matthew Effect - the notion of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Those who come from backgrounds where education is valued, where museum visits etc are viewed as informative and useful, where discussion takes place around the dinner table, where books are read, come to secondary school with much cultural capital - and much knowledge in long-term memory already, such as times tables. Those who come from backgrounds where these things are not viewed as important come to their secondary school careers without that cultural capital. Our poorest students in this regard are best served through the transmission of high-quality knowledge from word go, from a teacher standing at the front of the room teaching explicitly. Only when they have such knowledge can they even begin to develop domain-specific skills.

And this is partly why our curriculum fails our children, because it supposes, wrongly, that biologically primary skills such as 'Working with Others' and 'Being Creative' can somehow be taught, and indeed should be emphasised in our classrooms. However generic skills, if they even exist, should not be 'taught' in schools. Because skills are domain-specific, as Daniel Willingham quite rightly points out, and are preceded by subject knowledge. If our students don't have knowledge, they cannot develop the skill. And let's also not forget that schools exist to transmit knowledge and to develop biologically secondary skills. Reading and writing are prime examples. So why our curriculum focuses on biologically primary skills is a question which needs asked loudly. Sadly, our curriculum follows in the vein of the Scottish and Welsh curricula, all of which have the potential to damage the experiences of our children who need a strong, knowledge-rich education most.

So, Mr Fitzgerald, give our schools and teachers a break, and move away from what appears to be a one-dimensional agenda to analysing the real issues facing our education system.