McGuinness In Office: Ulster's schools need more than good exam results

The new education boss has already said he is against selection and the 11-plus.

It is a brave man who would play around with Ulster's education system, which enjoys the same reputation for stony-faced adherence to traditional standards as the Scots one does. Only more so.

It boasts a string of highly respected grammar schools, Catholic and Protestant, from St Columb's in Derry to Belfast's Methodist College and the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. And its exam results are significantly better than those in the rest of the UK.

Nearly 55 per cent of Northern Ireland's teenagers get five top grade GCSEs (grades A* to C) compared with only 46 per cent of their English counterparts. Ulster's A-level results and staying-on rates are similarly impressive: 22.6 per cent of sixth-formers get A-grades, outstripping the national average of 17.5 per cent. For years, its schools (72 grammars and 165 non-selective "secondaries") have been adduced as compelling evidence that the grammar system works.

Now, though, its days seem numbered. Sinn Fein's new minister for education, Martin McGuinness, has indicated his antipathy to selective education and his total opposition to the 11-plus exam. His view is shared by middle- of-the-road nationalists in the SDLP and by the teaching unions.

The debate will find a new focus early next year when a Government-backed investigation is published. The researchers, headed by Prof Tony Gallagher from Queen's University Belfast, have been told not to reach a judgement on whether the system should change. But it is probably the abolitionists who have most to look forward to.

Prof Gallagher believes that the true pattern of achievement in Northern Ireland is considerably more complicated, and rather less positive than the aggregate exam results suggest. His report will also point to the wealth divide which has for generations seen the middle classes take up a disproportionate number of Ulster's grammar school places.

Prof Gallagher will also say that middle-class parents throughout the province are shelling out as much as pounds 45 a week to coach their children through the 11-plus. The researchers conducted a survey of primary schools which suggested that most working-class parents did not aim for grammar schools in the first place.

Mr McGuinness may be interested to see the analysis carried out by Dr Niall McCafferty, co-ordinator of the anti-selection campaign group Education Reform 21. He found that Ulster grammars vary greatly from region to region in the number of pupils they accept, and that there is no straight correlation between their levels of academic selection and achievement. Some of the least selective, most "comprehensive" grammars get the best results.

"There are endless factors that affect educational outcomes; the system is only one of many," he told a recent London conference. "Northern Ireland's schools do not have to contend with anything like the size and intensity of problems with which schools in England have to struggle."