Ms Hilary Copeland:

I thank the committee for inviting us to attend. I will speak to it from the perspective as a past pupil of integrated education. Like many other alumni, I got involved in setting up the Integrated AlumNI in 2013. A number of former pupils of integrated schools who now live and work in various locations throughout the UK, Ireland and the US came together to offer us a social network group and a way to connect, to help support and encourage present pupils at integrated colleges through mentoring, career advice and helping to raise their aspirations, to spread the message about integrated education, and to lobby and campaign.

I will tell the committee a little about when I first went to an integrated school. The school I attended is called New-Bridge Integrated College and is situated approximately 40 minutes south of Belfast and 40 minutes north of the Border. When I started there at 11 years of age, the school was in the third year of its existence. There had been a long delay in the development of the school site in 1995 in the rural, small village of Loughbrickland in County Down. The delay owed to the fact that, after the site was finally secured, the farmer who owned the field would only permit building work to commence once his harvest had been taken in.

By the time I started school in 1997, there were 156 pupils in the student body, which could easily have fitted into one of the committee rooms. During my time at New-Bridge, there were no illustrious past pupils to return and speak at assemblies and prize days because nobody had yet graduated. In 1997, when I was 11 and starting secondary school, none of the issues happening around me, in the mouth of the Good Friday Agreement to be signed the following year, was a factor for me. I was not aware of what was going on or what the adults around me were deciding about my future. I knew that my parents had let me do what I wanted, namely, go to New-Bridge. Although I was academically able and had secured a place at a grammar school, they were happy for me to attend a school that did not have any academic attainment record, past pupils or an established reputation.

When I look back now as an adult, I think about how brave we all were to take such a great leap of faith on an unfinished school that, weeks previously, had been a field, at a time when our country seemed to have little faith in the notions of peace and co-operation. Twenty years later, I am proud we all had faith in the experiment. In particular, I think of the staff who left permanent positions at other schools to come, take part, build and establish a new place for us all, and of how hard we all worked, because we wanted to make it work. We were very much united in a confident belief that the model of education, despite its apparently humble beginnings and despite us knowing we were in the minority, would build a better future for us all.

When I started working as an adult, I lived in Scotland for a while and then moved back to work in arts management in Belfast. It was clear to me then, when I worked with others who had attended school in Northern Ireland, that their experience of school had been different from mine and that was when I started to realise what that had meant to me. I learned that learning, working and making friends with all kinds of people who could talk about our differences and joke about the same matters about which we saw the rest of our country fight was a normal part of our education. It was just school to us. I became aware that for most children in Northern Ireland, their experience of school is not at all the same, and we in the Integrated AlumNI believed we could change that.