Rev. Trevor Gribben:

I am a minister of the church. I have served in the inner city in Belfast. My first parish was in Strabane in the far west and then I served in north Belfast and Newtownabbey. I now work and lead up, together with others, the central secretariat. I have key responsibility for education, both north and south of the Border. I interact with governments in both jurisdictions.

I will give a perspective on the unique educational challenge for what has been coined in many reports as "Protestant working class boys". To use that shorthand could appear out of context to be offensive, to describe a person as Protestant, could be seen as sectarian, working class as an old fashioned term and boys as a gender issue but every report that has been done objectively by academics and other educationalist over the past number of years , as Very Rev. Dr. Norman Hamilton has hinted, that for whatever reason the most challenging educational environment in the North is in the inner city among Protestant working class boys. What is the reason for that? Much research has been conducted and many of the conclusions when drawn together bring two key factors into play, first the decline, as happened in many cities of traditional industry such as shipyards, the rope works and so on. They were located in the city and for a whole variety of reasons, which I hope are now in our past and from which we have on, tended to provide employment for one section of the community. They tended to be Protestant working class from east Belfast and such areas. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as across the western world, those traditional industries began to decline. One might say quite rightly that has happened all over the place, but other places in the United Kingdom, Ireland and throughout Europe have moved on and people have coped with that decline of traditional manufacturing industry. Why are the Protestant working class boys the most educationally disadvantaged in inner city Belfast? The reason is that as those industries were in their steepest decline during what we euphemistically call the Troubles began in the late 1960s. Communities that needed 15 to 25 years to turn around from a focus on traditional industry did not have the same opportunities as other parts of the United Kingdom.

There should have been investment in those communities, along with other working-class deprived areas in Belfast. Much of the money in question was used to deal with the Troubles and the impact of the Troubles. Those communities never got a chance to reinvent themselves. There was a low level of respect for education. Many people knew they would get a job in the shipyard at the age of 14 because their fathers and grandfathers had worked there. The educational aspirations in such inner-city communities were low. The nature of the sectarian issues in Belfast meant that such communities tended to be in working-class Protestant areas.

What has happened since then? We went through a period of ceasefires which led to the Good Friday Agreement 15 years ago. The communities to which I refer, which were affected by low self-esteem, massive unemployment and a lack of value being placed on education, also suffered from the blight of loyalist paramilitaries allegedly defending them against republicans but in practice oppressing them in many ways. This meant that those communities could not develop. As a result, 30 or 40 years after the decline of traditional industry, there was still massive unemployment, a lack of self-esteem and low levels of desire for education. When the Good Friday Agreement came along, it offered hope and a new beginning. Where are we, some 15 years later? As Dr. Hamilton said, there is a sense in those communities that the hope I have mentioned has not been delivered on. There is a sense in working-class Protestant communities in inner-city Belfast that the Good Friday Agreement did lots for "them" - middle-class Protestant communities further up the road and Nationalist Catholic communities - but little for "us". The Good Friday Agreement is seen by those people as not having delivered.

I would like to refer the committee to two recent reports. In 2004, a task force of the Northern Ireland Department for Social Development published a survey, Renewing Communities, which drew attention to the fact that Protestant working-class areas of inner-city Belfast had been diagnosed as having low educational attainment, low aspiration and apparent acceptance of economic inactivity. That was especially true among young Protestant males. In March 2011, Dawn Purvis, who was an MLA for East Belfast at the time, brought together a group that produced an excellent report on educational disadvantage in Protestant working-class communities. The report, which was published in March 2011, contained many recommendations and was well received. It emphasised the need to invest in early years education in order to increase the level of educational aspiration. It recommended that schools be given a greater degree of flexibility to allow them to move away from an enforced common curriculum at secondary level, if necessary, and develop vocational courses. It called for the issue of academic selection to be dealt with in some kind of working compromise. To put it bluntly, there has been a lack of delivery of some of those practical things.

The level of educational aspiration among the Protestant community in some areas of inner-city Belfast means that education is not valued. This is reflected in some parts of the Catholic community as well. There is a need for a massive investment in early years education so that this can be turned around. I will give an example. The 2011 report recommended that a co-ordinating group be established. Most Protestants in Northern Ireland tend to go to controlled schools. That sector has never had a sectoral group to share good practice, to build ethos and to build identity. The Council for Catholic Maintained Schools has worked to build ethos and share identity in that sector, but there has not been an equivalent group in the controlled sector. Two or three years after the establishment of such a group was recommended, it is still not in place.