The North's minister for education Catriona Ruane's abolition of the selective 11-plus exam for entry to secondary school has unleashed a storm of protest, united old adversaries and worried parents, writes DAN KEENAN, Northern News Editor

CAITRIONA RUANE’S supporters claim the North’s minister for education has abolished a form of educational apartheid and is reforming the Northern post-primary schools system basing on equality and inclusion. Her detractors accuse her of arrogantly destroying everything that was good about second-level schools, sacrificing decades of excellence on an altar of political dogma.

Two years after the restoration of devolved government in Belfast, it has become the issue, more than any other, which fires the most heated exchanges in the Northern Ireland Assembly and lays bare the most glaring division in the four-party powersharing Executive.

The re-emergence of dissident republican violence, arguably designed in part to split the Executive along traditional lines, provoked a strong and united response from Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness, the political parties and the churches.

It has been the education row, however, which is testing the Executive’s mettle and ability to address complex issues with any sense of a progressive spirit.

The row over school reform has widened beyond the merely educational and now embraces wider competing notions of social justice, class and (of course) religion.

For the past two years, the Stormont education minister has doggedly stuck to her aim of scrapping what she claims is the out-dated and counter-productive 11-plus schools transfer test.

The exam has no pass mark, no re-sits are possible, and has been used since the 1940s to separate the supposedly top 25 per cent or so more academic 10- and 11-year-old children from the majority, filtering them into the grammar schools. The rest are destined for the so-called “secondary” schools.

Highly controversial and widely disputed, the 11-plus forms the basis of the current mode of schools transfer in Northern Ireland and consequently the shape of second-level schools’ provision.

It has proved effective, but at a price. While Northern grammar schools have performed admirably in terms of top-end excellence at GCSE (the near equivalent of the Junior Cert) and at A-level (the nearest thing to the Leaving Cert), the schools system is diminished by an alarming rate of failure at the other end of the scale.

Thousands of children, more working-class than middle-class, leave school at age 16 under-qualified for the modern world with its new emphasis on the “knowledge” economy. Data for 2007 shows around 1,100 of these young people left with no formal qualifications whatsoever, while around 12,000 entered the labour market without five GCSE passes including English and maths – the education department’s definition of “basic” qualifications.

The need for reform is evident and made all the more pressing by demographic trends which have led to some 50,000 empty school desks – a figure projected to rise to 80,000.

The fall-off in the birthrate has prompted the grammar schools to accept pupils with lower 11-plus grades to fill their classrooms, thus leaving it to the secondary schools to deal with the falling registers and the resulting sense of decay.

The Sinn Féin minister, however, has gone much further than simple abolition of the 11-plus, the last of which was taken by around 15,000 children last November. Ruane has declared an end to the principle of “academic selection” and advocated a new system whereby children decide at age 14 what form their continuing education will take and whether it will be more academic or vocational.

In doing so, she has begun what is potentially the most momentous shake-up in Northern education since 1947 and the advent of free education itself.

However, Ruane’s reforming zeal is being held in check. Her Executive colleagues, principally those in the DUP and the Ulster Unionist Party, do not have the power to stop her abolishing the 11-plus. But they do, and are, blocking her capacity to regulate the new transfer process she has in mind and to place it on a statutory footing.

The result is that those children on course to transfer to second level in 2010 are entering a new, untried and unregulated system.

Unable to legislate, the minister can only issue recommendations and guidelines as to how she would like to see the new transfer process evolve. The unexpected scope now afforded second-level schools to determine how they select the 2010 pupil intake has led to something of a free-for-all. As a result, parents say they are confused and anxious, school governors are seeking legal advice, law firms are drawing up new advertisements to attract the litigious and the Catholic church is diplomatically calling for clarity.

All the while, the atmosphere surrounding the controversy has soured.

The political exchanges between the parties is growing ever more bitter and even the comments of the minister about the grammar schools have grown more strident.

Last month, restating her claims that there is simply no need for schools to set academic tests to select suitable entrants, she accused them of compromising children.

“No child should be tested at 10 or 11, it’s wrong,” she said. “It shouldn’t be happening and it’s an abuse of their human rights,” she told BBC Radio Ulster.

The grammar school sector is divided among its component parts. The Catholic grammars are drawing up their own transfer tests, as are those in the State sector (wrongly referred to as Protestant schools).

The two groups have gone their separate ways, opting for differing forms of testing. The Catholic sector is planning two tests in English and maths, monitored by the tried and tested British National Foundation for Educational Research. The recently-formed Association for Quality Education (AQE), an umbrella organisation in the State sector, is planning three one-hour Common Entrance Assessment tests using its own separate system which is still being devised. Its chairman, Sir Ken Bloomfield, talks of a “shared understanding” between Catholic and State grammars, but while the two groups have met, there is still no common approach.

As a result, children who apply for grammar schools in both sectors may have multiple tests to take.

Ruane, unable to stop academic testing by force of legislation, can only issue warnings.

She has said grammar schools that set academic entrance tests are entering a “legal minefield” and will be forced to finance their own legal defences in the event of challenges from parents resorting to the law to get their children into the “best” schools.

This week, the grammar schools issued competing sets of guidelines to ensure the identity of those children who opt to sit their entrance examinations. The old 11-plus was taken in the child’s primary school, where their ID was confirmed by their teacher.

The new tests will be taken in the unfamiliar surroundings of the grammar schools themselves and supervised by those with no knowledge of the candidates.

As a result, demands for up to three photo-ID documents, signed parental declarations and birth certificates are being issued – all adding to the sense of parental confusion and alarm.

All the while, parents are wondering how best to prepare their children for the various tests they may sit next November. The minister has called on primary school teachers to stick to teaching the primary school curriculum and not be tempted to help coach children for any of the new forms of testing.

Aware of this, the Catholic grammars, along with two religiously integrated and four non-denominational schools – calling themselves the Post-Primary Transfer Consortium – have drawn up test papers which they will issue to parents when they register their children as candidates.

The AQE has a sample paper, based on the primary curriculum, and has insisted it will not produce any more in an effort to help prevent coaching they said they would not issue any more, in line with the aim to stop schools coaching pupils.

Meanwhile, some law firms have taken to internet advertising, confident that parents will be going down the legal route at this stage next year.

One advert sounds what to many is a prophetic note.

“Consider the following,” it advises. “Has your child lost out on a place in the school of their choice? Do you feel that the process or criteria are unfair or disadvantage your child in some way? Do you feel that there has been a flaw in the decision-making process, or with the criteria that the school has adopted or with the way those criteria have been applied? Has there been a failure to take proper account or your child’s special educational needs or special circumstances or other factors affecting your child’s performance? Or maybe some element of unfairness, ill-treatment or discrimination – whether conscious or unconscious – has crept into the decision-making process?”

It concludes: “If you have answered Yes to any of these questions, you may well be able to mount a legal challenge to the transfer arrangements to ensure that your child’s educational needs are properly met.”

The freefone number follows. It could be an option many parents will feel compelled to follow.

Divided we stand: what they say

Statement by 37 Catholic primary school principals

“The tests in format and structure are alien to work carried out in our school. Sample test material presented to us is completely inappropriate in terms of content, structure and format.”

Statement by Sinn Féin education spokesman John O’Dowd

“Those grammar schools’ boards of governors, who have announced that it is their intention to set their own, unregulated, legally precarious test are attempting to continue a system of exclusion rather inclusion and should, in the interests of a new beginning to education, abandon their bid to replace the 11-plus.”

Statement by Cardinal Seán Brady

“Agreement on this issue is urgent and would signal that politics in Northern Ireland has come of age and is hard at work. [Parents should] not to buy into the idea that only one type of school provides quality education.”

Statement by Tony Gallagher, Prof of Education, Queen’s University Belfast

“Partnership government should be about saying: This is what we would like, so lets talk about what we can agree to put in place. That’s what they should be doing and they’re not. They are sitting with their fixed positions shouting at one another.

Statement by Sir Kenneth Bloomfield of the Association for Quality education (AQE)

“The whole situation is unsatisfactory. We never wanted to have an unregulated situation. We have consistently said that we bring our proposals forward in difference to consensual agreement. It would be much better for everybody if we had agreement and a state-sponsored exam.”