DUP must come clean on transfer at 14 – Allister
01 December 2008
Statement by Traditional Unionist Leader Jim Allister MEP:
“It’s time for the DUP to come clean on precisely where it stands on selection/election at 14.
On 25th November 2008 in the Belfast Telegraph Mervyn Storey MLA emphatically declared there would be no compromise on academic selection at age 11. (Strangely though his statement does not appear on the DUP website.) Yet just a few days ago the DUP delivered to Sinn Fein, as part of their on-going negotiations, a paper which included the following telling statements:-
“However none of these matters (issues set out earlier in the paper like whether in pupils interests to attend 3 schools rather than two, extra costs etc) are sufficiently concerning to force us to feel instinctively that agreement around transfer at 14 could not be found.”
“…Fourteen could become the key decision point for the future…We would be flexible about the instrument for matching pupils at 14…The vast majority of the province could move to a transfer at 14 system...However was the executive to indicate clearly that 14 was the key point for making decisions about pupils’ futures and the key transfer stage, inevitably the broader system would reconfigure to accommodate that….Fourteen however would be promoted and supported as the key decision point….”
So if a few days ago the DUP was offering to agree transfer at 14 – in a document remarkable also for its lack of mention of grammar schools – but Mervyn Storey is assuring us they won’t budge from 11, or academic selection, just where does the DUP stand? Who is fooling who? And who speaks for the DUP its spokesman, Mr Storey, or the backroom boys who drafted the paper of sops to Sinn Fein?
Transfer at 14 would wreck our grammar schools. It works where that is the established system, as in the Dickson area, but where grammar schools are key to the educational system, then it would be their death knell.
This duplicity over the transfer age, taken with the cave in over Ruane’s ESA (Education & Skills Authority), which looks like it was agreed as a trade off for PPS 21, alarms me as to the future of our grammar schools. The ESA is designed to bring a wholly centralised approach to education, driven forward by a chief executive whose progressivist ideology is antithetical to everything grammar schools stand for. There are two strands to education; curriculum and assessment The DUP seem unaware of the profound curricular implications of ESA given the chief executive’s dismissive attitude to the notions of truth and falsehood in the various disciplines.
Under the ESA the voluntary grammar schools, in particular, will be subjugated. They would lose their autonomy, with the ESA becoming the employer of their teachers and driving their agenda of non-selective education.”
First published: 27/11/08
