Mr. Sam Fitzsimmons:

Northern Ireland remains a divided society. This is most notable in the largely separate nature of our education provision, which means that the majority of our children and young people of school age continue to be educated within a single-identity setting. Approximately 90% of pupils in Northern Ireland are educated in schools that identify with a single tradition or denomination. Only 7.2% of pupils in controlled schools are Catholic and 1.1% of pupils in Catholic-maintained schools are Protestant.

The collapse of the Assembly has presented challenges in growing integrated education, but it has also provided an opportunity for the integrated education movement to engage with politicians, educational stakeholders and academics to look at a way forward and seek agreement on an independent commission to review education. The IEF's alternative manifesto sets out a roadmap for a more inclusive and integrated education system, and our collaboration with academics in the Ulster University school of education provides robust evidence-based research that is helping to cast a light on some of the areas of education that contribute to school separation and additional costs. An example of this work can be seen in the briefing paper, Employment Mobility of Teachers and the FETO Exception, which we have supplied to the committee.

I will hand over to Ms McNamee to provide a little bit of background of integration in practice.