Profiting from the dividends of peace

Fran Abrams visits a Northern Ireland school that stands to gain from the ceasefire

Staff and pupils at Hazelwood Integrated College in North Belfast have a special interest in the peace process. If the ceasefire holds, the school's sprawling mess of mobile classrooms and substandard concrete blocks will give way to a new three-storey building. Its once-beautiful 1830s Neo-Classical central building will be restored to its former glory.

Hazelwood hopes to receive £9.9m in the next financial year from the "peace dividend". Its refurbishment is part of a planned £63m building programme covering 27 schools and using money released from the law and order budget.

No doubt many head teachers of English and Welsh schools will cast an envious eye on their Northern Irish counterparts in the next year. Of the £550m allocated by Department for Education for capital spending in England in 1995-96, £130m will be distributed among the country's 1,000 grant-maintained schools. The country's other 21,000 schools will receive £426m, which would add up to £19,700 per school if it were distributed evenly. Northern Ireland's grants add up to £115,000 for each of its 1,300 schools.

But no one could begrudge Hazelwood its good fortune. Now 10 years old, the mixed-religion college for 11- to-18-year-olds was set up by a group of parents and had no state support for its first three years. It started out with just 17 pupils in a hall behind a Co-op store which had been bombed so often that no one else would use it.

Now grant-maintained and based on the site of an old girls' school, the college has 640 pupils and is oversubscribed despite falling rolls in the area. Its exam results were the best in any of Belfast's non-selective schools in two of the past three years. Its pupils, 60 per cent Catholic and 40 per cent Protestant, rub shoulders amicably, despite coming from a district with the highest level of sectarian violence in the province.

Despite its success, the school is a sorry sight. Its main building has, for many years, been in need of new paint and plasterwork, and both its gym and original science laboratories are built of substandard concrete blocks. There are 13 mobiles, and the hardcore playgrounds flood whenever it rains because of poor drainage.

Now the school is to have a new running track and the main building will have all its external plaster replaced. Plans for the new three-storey building, which will house classrooms, science laboratories, a sports hall and a computer suite, are proudly displayed on the office wall of the head teacher, Tom Rowley.

"Paddy Ashdown came here once and told me to get the outside painted because it looked awful," Mr Rowley says. "I said I had better things to spend money on than paint."

The refurbishment will take three years to complete and, at least until the contracts are signed, could still be cancelled if violence is renewed. "It's all dependent on this peace thing," he says. "The longer it lasts, the more likely it is that the development will be successful."

It is perhaps no co-incidence that Hazelwood was listed as one of the 27 schools in the building programme - along with another of Northern Ireland's 23 integrated schools, the Bridge School in Banbridge, Co Down. There has been growing interest in these schools (where buildings must have been funded by parents for at least the first three years of their existence), and last week running costs were approved for four more. In addition, parents at a primary school in Portaferry, Co Down, have voted unanimously to go integrated from September.

All are oversubscribed, says Brendan Heaney, senior development officer for the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education. At one, Oakgrove College in Derry, 13 parents sought judicial review last year because their children's admissions appeals had been rejected.

"As more evidence comes across, parents who are actually thinking of grammar schools will come to recognise that an integrated education is a good education and not just some fine principle," he says.

Doug McAvoy, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, the UK's biggest teaching union with 183,000 members in England and Wales, says of the Northern Ireland windfall that schools there deserve help, but so do schools in England and Wales.

"This underlines the underspending in England, where money for capital projects has been biased towards a limited number of grant-maintained schools while the majority of pupils in local authority schools are left in buildings which are in a dilapidated condition," he says.