New university to be built for the poor and deprived of Belfast

Mo Mowlam had to request the television crews blocking the front of the Europa Hotel ballroom to move out of the way, and to keep their questions about politics until later.

There was an announcement to be made, one that had important implications for the high unemployment heartland of the Northern Ireland conflict, the once - and potentially still - violent streets of the Falls and Shankill Roads.

Six days after the Stormont agreement, the Northern Ireland Secretary was uncovering another revolutionary project, this time educational. For the first time in these islands, a university - that traditional bastion of elitist values - was going to be built specifically to serve the poor, the deprived, and the educationally disadvantaged of one of Europe's most battered working-class areas.

The British government would commit £40 million to building a £70 million "educational village" on a desolate site on the Springfield Road in west Belfast. The site, left vacant by the old Mackie's engineering works, spans the city's so-called peace line.

The Springvale project, as it has become known, has had a long gestation. It was first thought up in 1993 by senior officers of the University of Ulster, led by the high profile vice-chancellor, Sir Trevor (now Lord) Smith. Their original idea was for a traditional outreach campus of their university in west Belfast.

The project was welcomed by most of the local political representatives, including the North Belfast Unionist MP, Mr Cecil Walker.

However, doubts were expressed by three key players: the North's ultra-cautious Department of Education, which was worried about the ambitious project's high cost; the Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education, which puts on further and higher education courses in 140 centres around the city, and was concerned about its own expansion plans; and community groups in west Belfast.

According to the Sinn Fein leader, Mr Gerry Adams, these last thought it could be an "ivory tower" with students and staff coming in from outside and little impact on the area it was supposed to serve.

The British Tory government's reaction was to do nothing. The SDLP's Dr Joe Hendron, then MP for the area, remembers being warned by Sir Patrick Mayhew that if he kept forcing the issue the Government would turn it down: "if you lay off we'll just put it on the long finger."

By the autumn of 1996, after several feasibility studies had come to nothing, an exasperated Sir Trevor Smith put the word out that the Springvale initiative would have to "lie on the table until there were more propitious circumstances."

A few months later he and the head of the Belfast Institute, Prof Patrick Murphy, had a discussion which changed the whole nature of the project.

They came up with the idea, later espoused by the British Dearing report on higher education, of a "seamless progression" from foundation courses like literacy and numeracy through secondary and further education to degree and postgraduate courses.

The difference was that in Northern Ireland they envisaged all this happening on the one west Belfast campus.

This is the highly innovative "lifelong learning" college which Mo Mowlam unveiled on Thursday, the first of its kind in Britain or Ireland. The Government's commitment represented "the biggest investment in a higher education institute in the UK this year," she said.

It was no coincidence that the long-delayed announcement of Springvale came less than a week after the Stormont agreement. Dr Mowlam was confident that in the wake of that piece of history in the making there would be no lack of investors in the US and Europe willing pick up the tab for any funding shortfall. Even Gerry Adams had to admit it was a "declaration of intent" that the British were serious about the regeneration of west Belfast.

But this is not just about that much-maligned corner of these islands. When the first students enrol at Springvale, probably in 2002, at least some will have arrived by means of a unique new "lifelong learning" credit system which allows learners to achieve all their qualifications by stages.

Prof Murphy says this means that Springvale will provide, for the first time in the history of Northern Ireland's rigidly stratified education system, "a structured alternative to university entrance outside the grammar school system".

In future the 70 per cent who fail the cruel selection exam all Northern children have to take at 11 will not immediately be categorised as educational failures; they will know they can still build up credits over time to go to Springvale. In Mo Mowlam's words, the new college will give such young people "a second bite at the educational cherry," and be a model for third-level institutions elsewhere in the UK.

Mr Billy Hutchinson of the PUP says this will be particularly good news for parents and children in Protestant working-class areas like the Shankill Road, where currently only 3 per cent of 11-year-olds go on to grammar schools, and thus a chance of university, compared to 21 per cent in Northern Ireland as a whole.

Lord Smith's dream is that Springvale will do for the deprived areas of Belfast what the City University of New York has done for that city's poorer communities. He foresees the new campus organising parent-teacher groups, remedial classes, classes for high-achieving children, IT and other supports for north and west Belfast's schools.

"We aim to make sure that the children of the area experience third-level education as an absolutely normal part of their growing up. We want the community to see Springvale as their university in the way that the community of Derry has come to see Magee as their university."