Ms Roisin Marshall:

Those are very good points. We would concur that every school has to be a good school first and foremost and then parents will buy into the ethos. Funding is something we are also concerned about. We are very grateful for the £300 million allocated to integrated schools for their capital buildings, without which some of those schools would not have survived much longer because the schools were built with a core and mobile classrooms. They had a main block and mobile classrooms with a lifespan of 15 years to 20 years, most of which have surpassed that marker now. With that comes revenue as well. As our schools grow, the numbers of children attending integrated schools since the Good Friday Agreement have doubled. That is not a story a lot of people know about because the growth of school buildings is what is talked about but the number of integrated schools has doubled. With that comes the necessary revenue for teaching staff, for growth within the school buildings and so on as the school grows. That revenue is not there to back up the capital funding and we are concerned about that, particularly now as we have five development proposals for nursery units. Every child deserves the best start in life and if they do not have the opportunity for education in an integrated setting from age three that concerns us because the reason we were given was a lack of funding. That is the first time in our history we have ever heard that. We had to raise our own money through the Integrated Education Fund or through borrowing from the club bank but eventually, when we proved the viability of a school, the Department of Education would invest in it and a lot of the money would have come through Europe at that time. That is our concern. To me, integrated education would grow exponentially if it was financially incentivised. There is no doubt in my mind that would happen. Some £43 million is going into shared education, which is fantastic, but none of that money went into integrated education. It went to integrated schools that are involved in shared education but not to integrated education itself. Anything we can do to change that situation will be vital for the growth of integrated education.