Mr. Peter Osborne:

I will make a couple of comments in response. I am sure Ms Merron and Mr. Collins will have things to add. I welcome the questions and the fact that, over many years now, this joint committee has been looking at aspects of policy in these areas, including issues in respect of integrated education and education as a whole. These areas are covered by the Good Friday Agreement. It is really important that an eye is kept on the models and that advice is given to policymakers in the North as well as in the South as to how the Good Friday Agreement can continue to be advanced in these respects.

It probably has not advanced as much as it should have done. I will ask Mr. Collins and Ms Merron to talk about the integrated education model.

One thing the committee should look at in the context of the independent review of education, which has just started and will probably take a year or so before reporting, is how area planning works in Northern Ireland. Area planning is based largely on planning for the two different types of education system, and that is a real difficulty. If we had more time, we would go into research done by Ulster University on isolated pairs of schools. The authors of the research looked at villages throughout Northern Ireland where there was a controlled school and a maintained school within a mile of each other. They found 32 pairs, or 64 schools, in villages where the two different schools were within a mile of each other. Of those 32 pairs, in the case of 26 at least one if not both of the schools are below the threshold for sustainability in a rural area, which is 105 pupils. It is therefore very possible that in the next five or ten years one or both of those schools will close. The area planning model will not immediately recommend looking at planning for those schools in the village together. One might assume that they would look at amalgamating schools to ensure there is a school that survives in the village and ensures that the demographic mix in the village survives as well. The area planning model will look more to how, if one of the schools has to be closed, children from that school are bussed to the nearest school within that system, which may be five or ten miles away, in another village. Quite apart from the fact that this adds to the cost of bussing pupils to schools that are not the closest to them, which I think is about £81 million a year, involving about 130 million miles of extra bussing per year, which has an environmental impact, if one of the schools serving by and large one side of the community is closed and there is no integrated option in that village, eventually, over five, ten or 20 years, that village will be seen to edge slowly towards being a single-identity village from what might have been a 50:50 or 60:40 village. The parents of children from the background affected will increasingly look to move to another village where there is education provision for their children. I think that is one of the reasons we increasingly have single-identity villages and communities in large parts of Northern Ireland. That is one of the models that we think needs to be looked at through the review of education in Northern Ireland. It is one of the areas on which the joint committee could keep a watching brief to see if it wants to form a view about the area planning model in the education service in Northern Ireland.

I apologise - I have gone on for a long time. Does Mr. Collins or Ms Merron wish to add anything in response to the other questions?