Mr. Sam Fitzsimmons:

A question was asked if they are looking at a new school in a particular area. There are two planning authorities. That would be the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools, CCMS, which looks after the Catholic-maintained schools, and there is the Education Authority, which looks after controlled schools. They plan for those sectors. As mentioned previously, there is no body planning for integrated schools. On top of that, we have an estimated 50,000 empty school desks. There is rationalisation going on within our education sector. It is being rationalised sectorally.

There is, however, an opportunity for the planning authorities to look at retaining education provision in a particular area. We may, for example, have a Catholic-maintained school and a controlled school that are both undersubscribed and where both planning authorities will make decisions on whether to close each of those schools. There is not really a process in place where one could look at how the two schools could come together to make a sustainable school. The Integrated Education Fund is working with Ulster University in developing a community consultation mechanism. We have been working with the Education Authority and the CCMS to see if they could include that within area planning. We believe we are making some progress on that. This would allow communities to decide what type of education provision they would like in their area. From polling attitudinal surveys we can see that the majority of parents would choose to have an integrated provision in their community rather than no school at all.