More than 30 years on from the IRA’s ceasefire and more than 25 years after the Belfast Agreement was signed, the Catholic-Protestant divide in Northern Ireland still looms large.
Teaching Catholic and Protestant children in the same classrooms originated in the darkest days of the Troubles when parents from both sides of the divide in Co Down came together in the early 1970s.
Forming a group named All Children Together (Act), the parents believed there was little hope of healing society’s “festering wounds” unless children from both communities were taught together, a history of the campaign recorded later.
The first integrated school, Lagan College, opened in 1981 with just 28 pupils, despite substantial opposition from politicians, physical threats and scant financial assistance.
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In a new, major report on segregation in Northern Ireland’s society, the influential Belfast-based think tank Pivotal lays bare the scale of the challenges.
Today, more than two-thirds of parents, Catholic or Protestant, in Northern Ireland want their children to be educated alongside children from the other tradition. Yet just 8 per cent of children go to such schools, Pivotal’s report shows.
More than four decades on from Lagan College, 26,183 pupils are now enrolled in Northern Ireland’s 68 integrated schools, excluding preschool and nurseries. Of them, 11,162 are primary students and 15,123 are post-primary.
The gap between those who say and those who do is explained by geography, segregated communities, the shortage of school places, school authorities' slow pace of change or, sometimes, a degree of hypocrisy from parents.
The Education Authority and Stormont education ministers accept Northern Ireland has “too many small, unsustainable schools” and that deeply unpopular closures will become harder to postpone.
Increasingly, those schools are found as single-identity “pairs”, isolated in rural areas.
The closure of one school in a pair can “increase residential segregation”, as families move to other areas serving their identity, the report says.
“Stopping this dynamic, by promoting more cross-community schools and shared education, should be an urgent priority for those who wish to halt residential segregation and secure the futures of minority populations,” the report adds.
Persistent segregation means much of the work done to reduce division and promote reconciliation, while undoubtedly transformative for many, “has struggled to move the dial societally”, says Pivotal.
While the number of students going to integrated schools is not the full story of integrated education, it nearly is. Just 1.3 per cent of pupils attending a Catholic school in 2022 were Protestant, up only slightly from 0.7 per cent since 2001.
Catholic children are more likely to go to Protestant schools than the other way round, but they made up just 8.7 per cent of the numbers three years ago, up from 4.6 per cent in 2001.
Secularisation is changing the situation. However, to some degree Northern Ireland now has “three main communities”: Catholic, Protestant and Other, says Pivotal.
“How different communities identify themselves in surveys has changed at a different pace. In broad terms, those from a Protestant background have secularised in larger numbers than those from a Catholic background,” it says.
However, people often remain culturally Protestant or Catholic, even if religious observance has been left behind.
The report finds schools controlled by religious bodies have not done enough to increase diversity, with Catholic schools in particular, having “so far failed to attract significant numbers of non-Catholic pupils, with a handful of exceptions”.
The persistence of divisions in education and housing is revealed by a degree of despondency displayed by the young people interviewed for the Pivotal report
“They want more shared and integrated education and housing, as part of a widely expressed desire to move on from the divisions of the past. However, this support came with caveats, especially with regards to community safety and fear,” the report says.
“Even young people broadly in favour of more integrated schooling and housing often suggested this was for future generations, and perhaps an unrealistic aspiration for theirs,” the reports says.
Sending children to integrated education is not a one-off solution to segregation, either. One former attendee, a community worker named Interviewee F, “did not make any long-lasting cross-community friends” when they went to one.
Sectarian divisions remained and such views were not challenged “unless slurs were used”, Interviewee F told researchers. One thing that did help, they said, was after-school sports.
Living in segregated communities, as so many still do in Northern Ireland, complicates matters further. Interviewee F’s experiences were shaped not just by individual circumstances but by the wider social environment.
“They grew up in a single-identity area with a visible paramilitary presence, where an integrated school’s uniform was enough to raise questions from some locals about a pupil’s allegiances. Classmates from other areas did not feel safe visiting F in their home area,” the report says.
“Similarly, F felt unsafe visiting some of them,” it adds.
Meanwhile, nine out of 10 people living in state-provided social housing are in segregated communities.
Divided communities are but some of the problems facing Northern Ireland, which saw the lowest number of houses built in 2024 than any year since the second World War. In Fermanagh, just eight were built.
“This is an era of intense pressures on public services and budgets. Half of all schools are in deficit, unable to cover routine costs,” says Pivotal, adding that the schools estate is “deteriorating”, with ageing crumbling classrooms common.
Pointing to the “stark material and economic reality” curbing efforts to build a more united community, Pivotal said there are “huge shortfalls” in social and affordable housing, private rental costs are spiking, and “creaking wastewater” pipes block construction.
“Conversations around integration too often appear theoretical, rather than rooted in the real choices facing individuals, families, schools, housebuilders and government departments. Segregation is one concern of many.”
