Northern Ireland Conservatives’ spokesperson, Annika Nestius-Brown, has accused the education minister of “fixating on selection”, while Northern Ireland’s schools experience countless other difficulties.
“John O’Dowd’s ‘viability audit’ has revealed that more than 500 schools are struggling, yet the minister’s attention, so far as change is concerned, is focussed on the one sector which is doing reasonably well.”
“Almost half of all primary schools are experiencing problems educationally, financially or in terms of pupil numbers. The figure is 83.8% for secondary schools and 35% for grammars. All of these figures are too high; however the minister and his party are obsessed with attacking grammar schools, which are, for the most part, suffering less acute difficulties.”
“There are too many spare desks in our education system, which is undermining the viability of schools and means that there is certainly an urgent need to look at sharing resources across sectors and forwarding integration. However while the minister is vehemently opposed to schools selecting pupils on merit, he has done next to nothing to combat division and duplication along religious lines.”
“John O’Dowd needs to face up to the fact that his department’s own viability report is an indictment of the work of successive Sinn Fein education ministers. The minister needs to set aside his party’s obsessive, ideological hostility toward grammars and start to tackle the genuine problems which face schools in Northern Ireland.”