Paul Givan, Stormont’s DUP Minister for Education, is a creationist. This is very well known. In 2007, as a councillor in Lisburn, he famously succeeded in getting the council to write to all the secondary schools in its area, calling on them to teach creationism in science lessons. The DUP confirmed this was party policy, and raised it at Stormont with the then minister for education, Sinn Féin’s Caitríona Ruane. It caused “a tussle of biblical proportions”, to quote a Belfast Telegraph headline.
So it is understandable that Givan is the subject of suspicion from liberal quarters today. He is frequently accused of fighting a conservative culture war. Yet, suspicions against him have been authoritatively debunked by the courts in recent months.
Last January, Givan rejected an application from two state schools in Bangor, Co Down, to convert to integrated status. This decision was widely condemned, particularly by the Alliance Party. Some reaction implied the Minister was hostile to integration through sectarian prejudice.
Objectors brought an application for judicial review, and in October the High Court in Belfast threw it out on all grounds. Givan was found to have applied the law on integrated schools correctly, including the most recent 2022 legislation, passed by Alliance.
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The Minister won on fundamental points, not technicalities. Bangor’s 12 per cent Catholic population cannot sustain integrated schools - in fact, it can barely sustain Catholic schools. The town’s only Catholic secondary is the only such school in Northern Ireland with a significant Protestant enrolment. Doomed attempts at official integration by other schools nearby would destroy this unique success.
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Givan secured another victory in December with his programme to tackle educational underachievement. This uses a novel, complicated system to allocate funds across all geographic areas. Two applicants sought a judicial review, alleging the criteria discriminated against Belfast and Derry and more generally against Catholics. Again, the High Court threw this out on all grounds, ruling there was “nothing irrational” about the programme. The judge described it as “classic policy development”.
In November, Givan’s department lost a UK Supreme Court ruling over religious education and worship in schools. The Minister is now required to make the curriculum more inclusive of other faiths and to ensure pupils can opt out. He has promised to do so.
It was the most high-profile court action Givan has been involved with as Minister and the one that most directly recalls his agenda in Lisburn two decades ago. However, he had nothing to do with the religious education curriculum or the rules on worship. They were devised two decades ago under British direct rule ministers, then handed over to Ruane. The legal challenge to them was already under way when Givan took office.
The Minister is also under suspicion for planning a new management body for state schools. This will inevitably give the Protestant churches more influence, as they once owned most of these schools and still have seats on their boards.
However, creating the new body was recommended by an independent review of the education system that concluded the year before Givan became Minister. The same review recommended conducting a separate review into the general school curriculum - the religious education curriculum is devised separately.
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Givan commissioned this review, which reported last June, and appointed the independent experts involved. He and they were clearly influenced by the reforms begun in 2010 in England under Conservative education minister Michael Gove. Progressive teaching ideas were replaced with a more rigorous approach to content, detail, discipline and examinations.
The results have been undeniable: England’s school system has jumped up the international rankings to become one of the best in the world. Scotland took the opposite approach and saw its performance collapse over the same period. Yet the review has once again placed Givan under suspicion, with Sinn Féin, Alliance and others accusing him of plotting an ideological assault on the education system.
While there are legitimate differences of opinion on England’s reforms, it is painfully apparent that many of Givan’s opponents consider a person of his political and religious background to be unsuited to making decisions on these issues. Many of the Minister’s supporters might see this as prejudice against unionists or Protestants, or at least against DUP politicians and Free Presbyterians, but there is a broader form of intolerance at work.
Northern Ireland’s politics has become so stultifying that no policy can be developed beyond the lowest common denominator, especially if driven by a minister suspected of firm convictions. In a powersharing system dependent on consensus and consultation, all ideas tend towards a mushy mean, until even a proven centre-right reform of the education system appears radical and anyone proposing it might be denounced as a fanatic. Of course, Givan is not beyond criticism - far from it.
But the criticism of him really needs to evolve.
