Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 138)
MONDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2005
MS MAGGIE
ANDREWS, MR
SAMMY DOUGLAS,
MR JACKIE
REDPATH AND
MR JOHN
MCVICAR
Q120 Meg Hillier: Thank you very
much for coming and thank you for your submission which was very
interesting for me. We have quizzed other witnesses about the
issues around social deprivation and academic achievement, and
you link background with educational achievement. Could you tease
out for us why you think there may be differences in the performance
of pupils in maintained secondary as opposed to controlled secondary
schools? Is there any link there with social background, do you
think?
Mr Redpath: I hope that the paper
we submitted first of all establishes that there is a difference
and then what we need to move on to is analysing why there is
a difference. There is a whole range of reasons for this. If you
take the fact that we have got these different systems here in
Northern Ireland, over a number of generations the Catholic community
had their own system of education. It was interesting last week
when the whole question of all the contradictions across this
came up in terms of CCMS, which I assume you are au fait
with. There were a lot of people from the Catholic community that
leapt to the defence of CCMS. I can understand why. It was their
system of education. I give myself away here as my background
being from a Protestant community when I say "their system
of education". We did not have a Protestant system of education.
We had a state system of education. I think at one level there
was a greater sense of belonging for the Catholic community than
from our community but there is a deeper thing here as well, which
Sammy was describing, and that was that in the past from my community
in the Shankill and from East Belfast community the greatest thing
that you wanted for your son, because it was quite sexist then,
was that he would get an apprenticeship in shipbuilding or in
engineering in Mackie's or wherever. Your uncle or your father
or whoever got you in and that was also common to Glasgow and
Liverpool and other British cities.
Q121 Lady Hermon: What happened to
the girls?
Mr Redpath: We may come on to
that but that was the greatest aspiration you had for your son.
You did not need a qualification; you just needed an entry to
get that through your parents or through your relations. That
being the case, I feel that we did not place the same emphasis
on the importance of education because we did not need it. In
terms of the girls in the past in working class Protestant communities,
you just hoped they got married and had children and got a house
close to you.
Q122 Lady Hermon: The reason I ask
is that I grew up on a 50-acre farm in County Tyrone. I was one
of four girls and my father had this great emphasis on education,
that in fact we were all to be educated. I am just curious in
an urban area like Belfast what the tradition was for girls.
Ms Andrews: I grew up in the part
of the city I work in at the moment with communities, and certainly
my parents really valued education because it was the key that
unlocked the door to opportunity. I just think that that was possibly
even more common in the fifties and early sixties than it is now,
because the gulf appears to me to have become wider between the
sorts of communities I work in now, which is where I grew up,
and the aspirations around education. There certainly is a whole
raft of people in Protestant working class communities who do
not see education as an opportunity in the way in which your father
and my father would have done in the past.
Q123 Meg Hillier: In earlier sessions
we had witnesses from different camps but from the grammar school
sector they were saying that they felt that fewer people from
the Shankill area and others felt that grammar school education
was for them. Would you say that that is a true assumption today?
Some of these things are difficult to pin down but that is what
they seemed to be suggesting.
Mr Redpath: You surely are dragging
me into a discussion I did not want to get into. I failed the
11-plus in terms of selection. Grammar school education was never
really an option for people from the Shankill and we had 10 children
in 1988 and 13 in 1989 who managed to make it to grammar school.
What we are trying to say is that that is not our debate but if
somebody said that they did not feel it was for them, they did
not feel it was for them because they were debarred from it by
a selection process, but I just want to emphasise, and I am giving
full cognisance to Sammy Wilson sitting here, that that is not
what we are here about because doing away with selection or not
is not important to me. In terms of our case, whether it is done
away with or not is not going to answer the particular and peculiar
problem we have got.
Q124 Chairman: Just to clarify something,
I got a slightly different impression from my colleague, and certainly
we have just come from the Belfast Royal Academy where some of
us went over lunch to visit the school and meet people, and there
I was given quite impressive statistics both of the collective
number from socially deprived areas who were attending that school
and of the individual achievements of some of the real champions,
for example, one girl with five As and studying medicine at university,
but are you saying that this is very much an isolated example
still or that there truly are quite a number?
Mr McVicar: There is probably
a significant increase compared to the comments that have been
made previously in previous years.
Q125 Chairman: There is a long way
to go.
Mr McVicar: There is a long way
to go.
Chairman: We just want to reflect that
as accurately as possible.
Q126 Sammy Wilson: Can Jackie possibly
tell us out of how many children the 10 or the 13 were drawn in
1988 and 1989? How many children roughly would you have? Four
hundred, 500?
Mr Redpath: Yes, 450.
Q127 Chairman: Do you know what the
number would be now or not?
Mr Redpath: It is not dramatically
different. You might double it and say it is 22 but it is round
about that figure.
Q128 Meg Hillier: Perhaps I might
reflect on this outside the Northern Ireland context for a moment.
I think we recognise across the UK, certainly in my own constituency
and neighbouring constituencies in inner London, that white working
class boys are among the worst performing pupils at school. There
is a difference, depending on background, and you can break it
down and see by different ethnicity in London in a way that is
not appropriate in Northern Ireland. It is not so much about the
sectarian side of things; it is about other issues. I wanted to
tease out why you think this might be and how the system might
be made to help. You talked about parents being the first role
model and you also touched on education action zones. We have
seen some of the successes of Sure Start, not just in boosting
under-fives but also in boosting parental confidence. Are there
any measures you think that in the long run the Government should
be taking in Northern Ireland to help boost parents' confidence
in education?
Ms Andrews: We do have Sure Start
in parts of Belfast It is probably not as extensive as we would
want it to be. That is one of the key problems that would be identified
by a primary school principal, that her young children are arriving
at school with very poor language skills and they are pretty key
to moving on. We have had initiatives like what we call the enriched
curriculum. We have had lots of good opportunities to try and
make a difference but our main difficulty is that they are not
consistent. They do not last long enough. They are not in position
long enough to influence a whole cohort of young people as they
proceed from Primary 1 right through to secondary level. I think
that is one of our biggest difficulties, working with community
organisations and with parents in communities, that constant battle
to try and have good practice maintained. I am sure that is experienced
by schools as well in terms of management. Just to comment on
something that was mentioned earlier, one of our difficulties
in Protestant communities particularly, and it has been well documented
across things other than education but in terms of the way communities
have developed, is that they traditionally have a very weak infrastructure.
It is in their nature to be more individualist and less collective
in terms of how things are done, so we do have that additional
challenge of getting people involved at community level and then
getting them involved with schools.
Mr McVicar: One of the things
that we do, just to reinforce the comments that Maggie has made,
is acknowledge that we need to have an acceptance or a realisation
that we do have a problem, that would be the first step, and that
it is a significant problem. Jackie and I have the distinguishing
connection that in 1979 we were both physically laughed out of
the board room of the Belfast Education and Library Board. I have
served two terms on the board and am just moving into my third
term and there was a sense of déja" vu as I
walked out through the door for the first time, but in 1979 both
Jackie and I were involved in YOP and YTP. Very quickly we realised
that the 16-year olds who were coming onto that scheme had serious
difficulties in terms of their reading and writing skills. We
went to the Education and Library Board, not with a view to pointing
a finger and saying, "It is your fault" We went to them
to say, "It is a problem. How can we work together? How do
we resolve this?". The interesting thing is that Carmel Hanna,
who was Minister, I think, for the Department of Education and
Learning just prior to the Assembly breaking up, released somewhere
in the region of eight or nine million pounds of public money
to tackle problems in adult literacy in the 40-plus age bracket.
If someone had done something other than show Jackie Redpath and
John McVicar the door in 1979 that eight or nine million pounds
might well have been better spent, because the 16-year olds in
1979 were the 40-year olds that Carmel Hanna was trying to tackle.
It was no disrespect to her doing it but that is not the point.
It is about saying we do have a problem and short term solutions
are not the answer to what are long term problems. The refreshing
thing in Jane Kennedy's comment was that she was talking in terms
of ten years. We all accept that the Government have to have a
degree of accountability and tend not to look any further than
two to three years ahead, but the reality is that there are no
quick-fix solutions to this. There is a generational issue here.
There are parents of children, both in school now and going into
school, who have major numeracy and literacy difficulties. If
they do not have the skills to reinforce what schools are doing
during the hours of schooling we are fighting an uphill battle.
There is an opportunity in terms of the community perspective.
Those of us in the community would not say that we have all the
answers but we are part of a partnership that needs to tackle
this problem.
Q129 Mr Anderson: In terms of what
is on the table at the moment, which is the Costello proposals,
what is your view if that goes through? Would that be better or
worse or the same to the people you are working with?
Mr Redpath: I would have to say
that is not what we are here to talk about and we do not have
a view on it.
Q130 Chairman: I would appreciate
it if you did, and so would my colleagues, because this is what
sparked off this series of evidence-taking sessions. There is
this highly contentious series of proposals, the nub of which
is the abolition of selection. We have been hearing evidence this
morning from one group of people who say, "We want to abolish
selection as it exists at the moment but we feel we have to retain
a form of selection. Otherwise all the wonderful schools"—and
you talked about them in your opening sentences—"will
be in jeopardy". What we would like to know from you, and
this is why I must defend my colleague's question, is that you
have this commitment to particularly socially deprived parts of
Belfast, is this. Do you believe that the implementation of these
proposals will be better or worse in the context of your desire
for wider, better education for those people? Will the implementation
of those proposals make the situation potentially better or potentially
worse?
Mr Redpath: In terms of a formal
response, Chairman, it is genuinely a discussion that we do not
want to get drawn into. Those wonderful schools that you describe
are not in numbers accessible to the children of the areas we
are coming from. The reason I am saying we do not want to get
drawn into that is in order to emphasise the point that whatever
happens it is not going to deal with the problem that we are talking
about. There may be, in respect to a question being asked, individual
views that people may want to express but formally, I am sorry,
we are not here to respond to that bigger issue.
Chairman: Does anybody wish to give a
personal opinion?
Sammy Wilson: Can I put the same question
but from a different angle? Are the proposals which are put forward
in Costello, which would require, instead of a test, a profile
which would need a huge degree of parental input which would also
go across a whole range of things, including things such as musical
ability and things that youngsters can be tutored at, likely to
give a better opportunity for youngsters from the areas that you
are talking about or a worse opportunity?
Q131 Chairman: I would be interested
in individual responses even if we accept that you do not have
a formulated collective policy; we respect that. If you do have
an individual opinion which might help to inform the committee's
thinking, that would be helpful.
Ms Andrews: I have a daughter
who just did the selection test two years ago and is at one of
the very good grammar schools in Belfast just down the road from
here. She went to a prep school with a class of 22 young people
in it and 20 of them were tutored to go through that test. I benefited
from coming from a working class background and getting the 11-plus.
I come from a family where two of us got the 11-plus and two of
us did not. Three of us have degrees—guess who? The other
person went on to further education as well. It was quite a number
of years ago. I worry that that is not an opportunity that is
as open now to achieve in secondary schools as it is in grammar
schools and I think most people here are familiar with that. We
have some very good secondary schools and some excellent grammar
schools but we also have some schools that are not performing
as well as they could for young people and they unfortunately
perhaps tend to be impacting more on young, Protestant, working
class children. On a personal level, I am not sure that everybody
knows exactly what Costello will deliver or that everybody is
happy with the entirety of something like that. I think change
is frightening and I think to some extent we are very comfortable
with the system we have got. I do not think you can give parents
choice unless you give them the information to make those choices
and unless they are involved in their children's education, so
there is something there for me about a lot of parents not knowing
enough and not being involved enough in their children's education
and not being encouraged to be involved in it in a way that allows
them to make the best of any system that could exist. I think
a lot of us are a bit unsure about what Costello might mean. We
like the good things that we have got and we do not like the bad
things and we would love to see a change that fixes it for people
and starts to redress the imbalance between those schools with
seemingly very good resources and a lot of parental support and
the schools who struggle a bit with resources and struggle to
get parental support as well.
Q132 Chairman: Thank you for a very
thoughtful, helpful answer. Would you like to come in?
Mr Douglas: Yes, Sir Patrick.
I went through the whole selection procedure and ended up on an
apprenticeship scheme, so for me that failed me, but I agree that
there are a lot of good aspects to that. The difficulty that I
have is not with all those good bits; it is with the infrastructure.
There are so many parents out there who just do not value educational
attainment unless the infrastructure is there to encourage those
people. If you look at traditional community development and community
education, we are trying to engage those communities. There has
been a long history and tradition of that in Catholic communities
for a whole range of reasons over the years. If you look back
at community development, community education, self-help, a lot
of that stuff would have been happening within the Catholic community
over decades. It is starting to happen now within the Protestant
communities. For example,—and you would know this, Sammy,—there
are groups in East Belfast that bring people in in terms of community
education, people who have had a horrible experience at school,
but once they get on the ladder they give them a bit of confidence,
and very often it is women. We have women who are very often the
educators of their children. Unless we have those support structures
and mechanisms, it does not matter how great it is. I agree with
Sammy: there are great opportunities here, but we need those mechanisms
to support those parents in our communities.
Q133 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Mr McVicar, do you want to add anything?
Mr McVicar: I am picking up on
what Maggie said in terms of personalising it. I have a 19-year
old daughter who failed her 11-plus and who is in her second year
at Coleraine doing a degree in marine science. She sent me a text
message this morning saying, "Hope everything goes well for
your presentation today", because she was doing a presentation
to her university lecturers.
Q134 Chairman: I hope that goes well
too!
Mr McVicar: I certainly hope it
does, but the reality for Emma is that the transfer process was
nothing short of educational child abuse. That is the only way
I can describe it, and I was part of that. She wanted to do the
test. She wanted to go to a single sex school and I said to her,
"Because I went to the equivalent single sex boys' school
in north Belfast, by that quirk you are virtually guaranteed a
place in that school. You do not need to do this test", but
she wanted to do it to prove something to herself or to her classmates.
In some respects that set her back possibly for the first year
in school, but because of the support mechanism within the school
she progressed and she is now at university and I am very glad
to say that. I think, as Maggie has pointed out, that there are
a lot of children out there, young people, a lot of families,
who do not have the support mechanisms either within the family
network or directly or indirectly within the community. As a member
of the Education and Library Board I have had an opportunity to
read Costello on a number of occasions and I am still trying to
get my head round many of the things in it. There are some things
in it that are good and there are some things in it that are not
so good. There is a place for all facets of education in
Northern Ireland—grammar education, secondary education,
whatever it happens to be. It is how we get that mix and one of
the difficulties we have at this point in time is that we have
a situation in which it is—pardon my language—bums
on seats. It is how big is the pound sign above the child's head
as he or she walks through the door. When we lose sight of the
fact that education should be child-centred, that we should be
doing what is best for the children, the individuals and the collectives,
like we did in 1979 when Jackie Redpath and John McVicar were
thrown out of Belfast Education and Library Board, that is what
I am talking about.
Chairman: We appreciate those frank answers,
and what they illustrate as much as anything else is that we are
all very much motivated by our background and our experiences;
of course we are. We all have beliefs, we all have prejudices,
but it is very refreshing. Thank you very much for that.
Q135 Mr Anderson: My question was
not about the selection process. That seems to have been what
everybody has been focusing on. I just want to make the point
that what we are trying to do is develop education in the 21st
century, so in a sense it is trying to get your view. You did
make the point at the beginning, Jackie, that "we have the
best but we also have the worst of the worst" and that is
what I am trying to concentrate on. On the education action zones,
was the intention—and you might not know this but I am asking
you—to use some of the money not just for children but also
for educating the parents? I think that is key. Also, is there
any recognition of the importance of workplace learning in your
communities and is that happening, because my understanding is
that it has been happening but it is going to start being cut
back?
Mr McVicar: Certainly from the
prospect of workplace learning, one of the difficulties I have
with the Prime Minister's "education, education, education"
is that I think there are horses for courses. There are people
who are "destined" for a university or an academic education.
Go and try and find a joiner or a plumber or a bricklayer. South
of the border they ask whatever price they like. I was talking
to Jackie about this this morning. My brother-in-law set up a
business two years ago as a tiler. My wife looks after his accounts.
He sent three invoices down to Dublin last night for somewhere
in the region of £26,000 and that was just for labour. Basically,
pick whatever you want. It is harking back to the old days of
YTP and YOP and the difficulties that it did have, but there was
an emphasis there about workplace learning. It was about saying
to young people, "You are never going to be a brain surgeon
but you do have particular skills and there are opportunities
here to develop those skills", and I think we have lost that.
In some respects it is coming back again. There are major issues,
as I am sure you are aware, in terms of the whole job skills programme
and the difficulties that that has caused.
Q136 Lady Hermon: Can I ask you to
reflect on whether attitudes have changed or not? You gave a very
good account of what it was like when Jackie and yourself were
asked to leave and you were not listened to in 1979. Is the Department
of Education listening to you now? Is the Minister within the
Northern Ireland office, and in particular David Hanson who has
been tasked to set up a task force to look at Loyalist communities,
listening? Have you met him? Have you met the task force?
Mr Douglas: I met him this morning
in north Belfast. I think that is the fifth time that I have met
him but I have been involved in a number of groups, mostly in
East Belfast. All I can say is that as a Minister he has done
an excellent job. The key thing is he knows the issues. He came
out to East Belfast and we were saying that our biggest problem
is not unemployment or difficulties long term but slow educational
attainment. I must say that I have been very impressed with him
as a person. He has done an excellent job because he knows the
issues and his own constituency would have similar difficulties.
Mr McVicar: I have met him three
times, once by accident and the other two by design. I would say
from a personal perspective that I find him very approachable.
He is a very good listener. The difficulty I have, and I am wearing
another hat here as Chairman of Greater Shankill Community Council,
is that his officials announced the delivery team, as it was described,
to be headed up by the head of the Civil Service six weeks ago.
It took three and a half weeks before we got a reply from Nigel
Hamilton's office, and I am sorry to say the reply was—and
this is a personal interpretation and I know it is being minuted—"Don't
ring us. We'll ring you". Bearing in mind the complexities
of David Hanson's appointment by the Secretary of State in this,
it was not simply about education. It was also about the issues
within the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist community of being disaffected,
being ignored. That has in my opinion just added to that. I have
a constituency of 145 community groups across Greater Shankill
to whom I am answerable. They are asking me what has happened
and basically all I can say at this point in time is that on the
face of it nothing has happened. I have written to the Minister's
private secretary. I spoke to the Secretary of State last Tuesday
when I met with her and expressed these opinions, but it is a
personal opinion.
Q137 Lady Hermon: Is education the
main concern?
Mr McVicar: No. It would be a
major one but there are other issues.
Q138 Chairman: Do I infer from what
you have said, and Mr Redpath was very anxious to indicate that
these were personal opinions, that you are not as members of the
partnership having difficulty in seeing ministers, which is really
the substance of Lady Herman's question?
Ms Andrews: No.
Chairman: That is good. We are not here
to invite criticism of ministers. On the contrary, if we have
ministers given a good testimonial we are delighted because all
that my committee is interested in is furthering the interests
of Northern Ireland. During this, we hope relatively brief, period
before the Assembly is restored we are your one collective parliamentary
outlet—you have your individual members, of course—and
we wish to help. If ministers are doing a good job well we want
to know and if they are not doing it well we also want to know.
Thank you very much indeed. We have come to the end of this session,
sadly, but I would say two things. First of all, I want to reiterate
our appreciation for the work that you do, obviously, with great
conscientiousness and not always in the easiest of circumstances,
and we have travelled round your part of Belfast and we know it
cannot be easy. If there is anything that this committee can ever
usefully do please let us know, and if, when you go out today
(and it is a quite likely when you have had a short session),
you think, "We wish we had told them that", please write
to our Clerk. All I would ask is that you do so before 7 December
so that we have the papers to circulate before we see the Minister,
Angela Smith, on 14 December. Thank you very much indeed, and
continued success in what you do.
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