Professor John FitzGerald:

As for evidence, Northern Ireland's top academic economist, Professor Vani Borooah, published a book in 2015 in which he did a very detailed analysis. I found it very instructive. It shows that, because kids from a working-class background, in Belfast, for example, get selected for secondary schools and do not get into grammar schools, they have poor educational prospects. It is not necessarily the fault of the schools. The evidence from the Republic and elsewhere shows that, when kids are segregated by ability, kids in the top half of the distribution do not do any better while those in the bottom half do substantially worse. This segregation perpetuates a system that locks out those from working-class communities. This has wider social implications, about which I am not qualified to talk.

The problem is that grammar schools in Northern Ireland are very good. In talking to people in Northern Ireland and discussing this matter, I find great resistance, from both sides of the community, to anything that would disturb the grammar schools. Middle-class parents get their children into these schools and they do very well there. They are very good schools. It is a question of how to move away from the situation that pertains today. The secondary schools may be doing a really good job but the children attending them have poor prospects. There is a question about how to move towards an integrated system such as we have in the Republic. Shirley Williams, who died a few weeks ago, made a big change of this kind in England in the 1970s and faced great resistance. It is difficult and problematic.

Vani Borooah has modelled and estimated what he calls the Catholic ethos advantage. Kids from working-class or disadvantaged Catholic backgrounds do a bit better than kids from a Protestant background. He raised the possibility that this could be because the schools are better but it is much more likely to be because the parents have different expectations. I have seen this in the Republic, in my own area. In the late 1980s, I heard parents saying that there is no point in their kids remaining in school. In the late 1990s, the younger sisters and brothers of those kids continued on and went on to university. There has been a dramatic improvement in participation in education across social classes in the Republic. Parents' expectations are as important as the schools themselves. I am no expert on Northern Ireland. There are people here who know more about it. The research evidence, however, shows that this is a significant problem for Northern Ireland.