Q129 Mr. Dave Anderson: In terms of what is on the table at the moment, which is the Costello proposals, what is your view if that goes through? Would that be better or worse or the same to the people you are working with?

Mr Redpath: I would have to say that is not what we are here to talk about and we do not have a view on it.

Q130 Chairman: I would appreciate it if you did, and so would my colleagues, because this is what sparked off this series of evidence-taking sessions. There is this highly contentious series of proposals, the nub of which is the abolition of selection. We have been hearing evidence this morning from one group of people who say, "We want to abolish selection as it exists at the moment but we feel we have to retain a form of selection. Otherwise all the wonderful schools" - and you talked about them in your opening sentences - "will be in jeopardy". What we would like to know from you, and this is why I must defend my colleague's question, is that you have this commitment to particularly socially deprived parts of Belfast, is this. Do you believe that the implementation of these proposals will be better or worse in the context of your desire for wider, better education for those people? Will the implementation of those proposals make the situation potentially better or potentially worse?

Mr Redpath: In terms of a formal response, Chairman, it is genuinely a discussion that we do not want to get drawn into. Those wonderful schools that you describe are not in numbers accessible to the children of the areas we are coming from. The reason I am saying we do not want to get drawn into that is in order to emphasise the point that whatever happens it is not going to deal with the problem that we are talking about. There may be, in respect to a question being asked, individual views that people may want to express but formally, I am sorry, we are not here to respond to that bigger issue.

Chairman: Does anybody wish to give a personal opinion?

Sammy Wilson: Can I put the same question but from a different angle? Are the proposals which are put forward in Costello, which would require, instead of a test, a profile which would need a huge degree of parental input which would also go across a whole range of things, including things such as musical ability and things that youngsters can be tutored at, likely to give a better opportunity for youngsters from the areas that you are talking about or a worse opportunity?

Q131 Chairman: I would be interested in individual responses even if we accept that you do not have a formulated collective policy; we respect that. If you do have an individual opinion which might help to inform the committee's thinking, that would be helpful.

Ms Andrews: I have a daughter who just did the selection test two years ago and is at one of the very good grammar schools in Belfast just down the road from here. She went to a prep school with a class of 22 young people in it and 20 of them were tutored to go through that test. I benefited from coming from a working class background and getting the 11-plus. I come from a family where two of us got the 11-plus and two of us did not. Three of us have degrees - guess who? The other person went on to further education as well. It was quite a number of years ago. I worry that that is not an opportunity that is as open now to achieve in secondary schools as it is in grammar schools and I think most people here are familiar with that. We have some very good secondary schools and some excellent grammar schools but we also have some schools that are not performing as well as they could for young people and they unfortunately perhaps tend to be impacting more on young, Protestant, working class children. On a personal level, I am not sure that everybody knows exactly what Costello will deliver or that everybody is happy with the entirety of something like that. I think change is frightening and I think to some extent we are very comfortable with the system we have got. I do not think you can give parents choice unless you give them the information to make those choices and unless they are involved in their children's education, so there is something there for me about a lot of parents not knowing enough and not being involved enough in their children's education and not being encouraged to be involved in it in a way that allows them to make the best of any system that could exist. I think a lot of us are a bit unsure about what Costello might mean. We like the good things that we have got and we do not like the bad things and we would love to see a change that fixes it for people and starts to redress the imbalance between those schools with seemingly very good resources and a lot of parental support and the schools who struggle a bit with resources and struggle to get parental support as well.

Q132 Chairman: Thank you for a very thoughtful, helpful answer. Would you like to come in?

Mr Douglas: Yes, Sir Patrick. I went through the whole selection procedure and ended up on an apprenticeship scheme, so for me that failed me, but I agree that there are a lot of good aspects to that. The difficulty that I have is not with all those good bits; it is with the infrastructure. There are so many parents out there who just do not value educational attainment unless the infrastructure is there to encourage those people. If you look at traditional community development and community education, we are trying to engage those communities. There has been a long history and tradition of that in Catholic communities for a whole range of reasons over the years. If you look back at community development, community education, self-help, a lot of that stuff would have been happening within the Catholic community over decades. It is starting to happen now within the Protestant communities. For example, - and you would know this, Sammy, - there are groups in East Belfast that bring people in in terms of community education, people who have had a horrible experience at school, but once they get on the ladder they give them a bit of confidence, and very often it is women. We have women who are very often the educators of their children. Unless we have those support structures and mechanisms, it does not matter how great it is. I agree with Sammy: there are great opportunities here, but we need those mechanisms to support those parents in our communities.

Q133 Chairman: Thank you very much. Mr McVicar, do you want to add anything?

Mr McVicar: I am picking up on what Maggie said in terms of personalising it. I have a 19-year old daughter who failed her 11-plus and who is in her second year at Coleraine doing a degree in marine science. She sent me a text message this morning saying, "Hope everything goes well for your presentation today", because she was doing a presentation to her university lecturers.

Q134 Chairman: I hope that goes well too!

Mr McVicar: I certainly hope it does, but the reality for Emma is that the transfer process was nothing short of educational child abuse. That is the only way I can describe it, and I was part of that. She wanted to do the test. She wanted to go to a single sex school and I said to her, "Because I went to the equivalent single sex boys' school in north Belfast, by that quirk you are virtually guaranteed a place in that school. You do not need to do this test", but she wanted to do it to prove something to herself or to her classmates. In some respects that set her back possibly for the first year in school, but because of the support mechanism within the school she progressed and she is now at university and I am very glad to say that. I think, as Maggie has pointed out, that there are a lot of children out there, young people, a lot of families, who do not have the support mechanisms either within the family network or directly or indirectly within the community. As a member of the Education and Library Board I have had an opportunity to read Costello on a number of occasions and I am still trying to get my head round many of the things in it. There are some things in it that are good and there are some things in it that are not so good. There is a place for all facets of education in Northern Ireland - grammar education, secondary education, whatever it happens to be. It is how we get that mix and one of the difficulties we have at this point in time is that we have a situation in which it is - pardon my language - bums on seats. It is how big is the pound sign above the child's head as he or she walks through the door. When we lose sight of the fact that education should be child-centred, that we should be doing what is best for the children, the individuals and the collectives, like we did in 1979 when Jackie Redpath and John McVicar were thrown out of Belfast Education and Library Board, that is what I am talking about.

Chairman: We appreciate those frank answers, and what they illustrate as much as anything else is that we are all very much motivated by our background and our experiences; of course we are. We all have beliefs, we all have prejudices, but it is very refreshing. Thank you very much for that.

Q135 Mr. Dave Anderson: My question was not about the selection process. That seems to have been what everybody has been focusing on. I just want to make the point that what we are trying to do is develop education in the 21st century, so in a sense it is trying to get your view. You did make the point at the beginning, Jackie, that "we have the best but we also have the worst of the worst" and that is what I am trying to concentrate on. On the education action zones, was the intention - and you might not know this but I am asking you - to use some of the money not just for children but also for educating the parents? I think that is key. Also, is there any recognition of the importance of workplace learning in your communities and is that happening, because my understanding is that it has been happening but it is going to start being cut back?

Mr McVicar: Certainly from the prospect of workplace learning, one of the difficulties I have with the Prime Minister's "education, education, education" is that I think there are horses for courses. There are people who are "destined" for a university or an academic education. Go and try and find a joiner or a plumber or a bricklayer. South of the border they ask whatever price they like. I was talking to Jackie about this this morning. My brother-in-law set up a business two years ago as a tiler. My wife looks after his accounts. He sent three invoices down to Dublin last night for somewhere in the region of £26,000 and that was just for labour. Basically, pick whatever you want. It is harking back to the old days of YTP and YOP and the difficulties that it did have, but there was an emphasis there about workplace learning. It was about saying to young people, "You are never going to be a brain surgeon but you do have particular skills and there are opportunities here to develop those skills", and I think we have lost that. In some respects it is coming back again. There are major issues, as I am sure you are aware, in terms of the whole job skills programme and the difficulties that that has caused.

This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee. Neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.

Promoted by Paul Foy on behalf of Dave Anderson, both of St Cuthbert's Church Hall, Shibdon Road, Blaydon, NE21 5PT