Mr. Nigel Frith:

I will make a few more brief points. The system is so rigid in Northern Ireland that it does not cater for real children. I can tell the members about Grace, who is in year 9 in our school. In terms of her mathematical ability, she is at the very top of the scale on the tests we ran with her when she joined the school. Cognitively, she is extremely high functioning. She was in the top ten of a competition for writing in The Guardianlast year, and yet she has a statement of special educational needs and needs a classroom assistant. Where else would we find a school that caters for that child's needs? She spans the divisions that are built inherently into our education system.

A question was asked about the shared education campus. I refer again to the question of a vision and purpose. The shared education campus in Omagh will be built on what used to be an army base site. Obviously, there is some significance to turning an army base into an educational site, which in itself is great.

Those schools will be built on that campus with their own front doors and fences, with their own badges and forms of governance. They will be as separate on the site as they are on their existing sites. Ours is the only post-primary school in Omagh not invited onto the campus. It comes down to money and the fact that we moved into a new building six years ago. We have accepted this, although we do not necessarily agree with it. However, the remaining post-primary schools in Omagh will move onto the campus within the next four or five years.

Nobody has yet answered the big question: what will happen there? There will be three shared blocks on the site and a great many separate classrooms behind their own front doors. The big question which will not be answered for years is whether it will gradually become an integrated campus or remain a set of separate schools built on one piece of land, with the tribal politics continuing. Nobody has answered that question. If it does become an integrated site, I will applaud it, but my fear is that that is not part of the vision at present.