Modernising the North's secondary education system should be a greater imperative than harmonising corporation tax with the Republic, argues Robin Wilson
For decades, while Northern Ireland's politicians jostled for power they didn't have,their views on economic and social problems were of little consequence. Somebody else - the British government, assisted by the Irish government - was responsible for making the decisions that affected everyday lives.
Since May 8th, however, with the renewal of devolution it has been a different story. And no issue is more fraught with consequences than, in education, the future of selection at 11.
The last devolved executive collapsed in October 2002, after revelations of an IRA spy ring at Stormont. As a parting shot, education minister Martin McGuinness - for decades a leading IRA figure - cocked a snook at his unionist colleagues by announcing the abolition of the so-called transfer test, by which Northern Ireland primary children are socially sorted into grammar and secondary schools.
It is a relic of the 1947 Education Act passed by the old unionist government, mirroring 1944 legislation in Britain.
While this brought free secondary education earlier than in the Republic, it was associated with an outdated conception of intelligence that divided children, via the 11-plus examination, into a small minority of academic sheep and the large residue of non-academic goats.
Comprehensivisation of education in Britain began in the reforming 1960s - reforms that, as elsewhere, the unionists rejected. Their hostility to domestic civil-rights reforms led, of course, to their eventual ejection from power by the British state.
Under direct rule, the 1989 education reform order extended to Northern Ireland a core curriculum for all schools. It became a nonsense to test for academic ability when all children, regardless of post-primary school attended, experienced the same curriculum.
McGuinness's 2002 decision reflected a review led by former ombudsman Gerry Burns and was supported by evidence of the negative (and arbitrary) effects of the transfer test. It chimed, too, with a review of the curriculum that shifted the emphasis from teaching conventional subjects to the competences all young people needed for the modern world.
Northern Ireland's education system is peculiarly ill-adapted to that world. Not only is it still segregated by religion. Its effective division in two by class fails to produce the intermediate stratum of technically qualified individuals who emerged from the institutions of technology after completing their Leaving Certificate and were key to the Celtic Tiger.
This, rather than lowered corporation tax rates in Northern Ireland - to which the British treasury was never going to agree because of their distorting effects elsewhere in the UK - is critical to post-Troubles economic recovery.
A less fragmented school system - there are 50,000 unfilled places - could, through collaboration among local schools and between schools and upgraded further-education colleges, offer every young person the chance to build their preferred portfolio on top of basic skills.
Instead of a high-stakes selection ordeal at age 11, at 14 pupils themselves should be supported in making choices from a menu of curricular options. Any testing should be for diagnostic purposes, rather than social sifting, and should culminate in a broad baccalaureate-type qualification rather than the more narrowly focused English A levels.
So far, so clear.
But enter Northern Ireland's dysfunctionally sectarian political system. The direct-rule administration legislated to remove the transfer test, whose last outing will be in the next academic year.
But the Democratic Unionist Party, despite the hostility of the then Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Hain, secured from the prime minister, Tony Blair, a deferral until devolution was renewed of a decision as to what would follow.
Devolution arrangements palatable to the DUP were hammered out in talks last year at St Andrews, with various blocking mechanisms added to the architecture arising from the Belfast Agreement of 1998.
Now not only did each community have an effective veto over the other side but each major party could now countermand its adversary's intentions.
Earlier this month, McGuinness's Sinn Féin colleague and and successor as Education Minister, Caitríona Ruane, told the assembly she would be following his announcement on the abolition of selection with a shift in focus to election at 14, with schools collaborating - she said nothing of the sectarian divide - to deliver individual educational pathways.
She met a hostile unionist reaction. Lord Morrow of the DUP accused her of sectarianism - Freud would have called that projection - and Basil McCrea of the Ulster Unionist Party forecast the ruination of the system.
Ruane got it right on the principle but wrong on the process. There is no collective responsibility in the devolved Executive - unlike its much-maligned predecessor in 1974, which agreed on collectivism at its first meeting.
By going on to the floor of the Assembly before seeking the agreement of ministerial colleagues, invoking to boot the unilateralism of McGuinness in 2002, she was bound to provoke opposition.
And she missed an opportunity to present the move to 14 as consensus-seeking, marrying the predominantly Catholic concern with equality with the predominantly Protestant concern with individual diversity.
The Minister may hope to bypass the unionist Assembly majority by using the negative resolution procedure, rather than legislation, to introduce new criteria for admissions to secondary schools in line with the pupil profile advocated by Burns, though recourse to the courts by her ministerial opponents would surely follow.
Meantime, 25 grammar schools - all with a predominantly Protestant population - have agreed to impose their own academic admissions test from 2009-10, though how they would cope with the costs of litigation from aggrieved parents is anybody's guess.
In this looming political black hole, parents and teachers of primary-school children are becoming increasingly anxious. That anxiety will surely be eventually communicated to the children themselves.
The episode raises two very big questions. Do Northern Ireland's political parties, given their current alignments, have the intellectual and moral wherewithal to resolve day-to-day concerns? And do the devolved governance arrangements, so elaborately crafted over decades by officials in London and Dublin, meet the test of reality on the ground?
Robin Wilson, a former editor of the Belfast-based Fortnightmagazine, is a policy analyst