Mr. Peter Osborne:

They are all relevant and pertinent questions. Again, time is against us in some ways, but I will attempt to give brief answers. I did not pass my 11+ examinations. I do not use the word "fail". I did not fail it; it failed me. It failed every other child in the class I attended. I was brought up in a working-class area in Ballybeen. Every child failed the 11+ examinations in my year. I was fortunate in that circumstances allowed me to go on to university. What the system was really saying to me, however, was that I should know my place, which was not to go to university and wind up doing some of the things I ended up doing. That is completely wrong. The integrated sector has elements in its schools of how it deals with mixed abilities which could be part of the answer to this issue. Of course, that is the political answer. It is up to the Assembly to legislate and to take forward the answers regarding selection and 11+ examinations.

Regarding how we do this, we are in the middle of a 50-year-plus peace process. It will take at least that many years from the agreement. It will even take more than that, because in some ways we have successfully managed the divisions in our society, but what we need to do in a peace process is to tackle the causes of these divisions. We have been less good at tackling those causes of division. One of those causes is that we send almost all our children into segregated education. We must end segregation in education. We must have people from different backgrounds in the same classrooms, wearing the same uniforms, playing the same sports and doing everything together to enable them to understand and respect each other, despite coming from different faith backgrounds and having different political views. It is absolutely fine to have those different political views, but if there is no contact with people with other views and backgrounds, there will be less understanding of and respect for them.

Therefore, while we are in the middle of a 50-year-plus peace process, making those changes is not going to happen next year. One of the difficulties here is that people do not see how it is possible to make the changes. It is too difficult. One of the things I will be saying to the independent review, as well as to this committee, is that we need a 20- or 30-year roadmap of how we can make these changes over time. The longer we put that off, however, and do not have such a roadmap in place, the longer this peace process is going to last. We will end up not having a 50-year-plus peace process, but a 70-year peace process. We must take the necessary decisions about systemic change and what causes division, and not continue to try to just manage those existing divisions. By the way, the roadmap process, if we lay it out, would be like eating an elephant. It would involve doing it one step at a time and one bite at a time, and we would get there eventually. We must, however, have the roadmap in place to specify responsibilities on everybody at each stage.

I do not disagree about teacher training. That is absolutely right. Why on earth would we do it this way? If people said they were going into medical training to become a GP and we asked them whether they wanted to make Protestants or Catholics better, because, depending on the answer, the person in question would go to a different college to train how to be a doctor, what sort of madness would that be? Yet that is what happens in teacher training, by and large. Before the next round of PEACE funds comes in, I would suggest that we slice off £30 million, or whatever the figure is, to build a bespoke, state-of-the-art, best-in-the-world teacher training college that is going to be the teacher training college. I would then put a five- or ten-year process in place to move into that kind of system.

We are talking about adults here. These trainee teachers, by and large, are men and women in their 20s and we must have them train together to be teachers. I am sorry, but I could go on all day about some of this stuff. Whenever there is a system where people are brought up, by and large, in one sector or another, for example, where they go to school with Protestants or Catholics, and they are from that background, what happens later? We then put them into teacher training colleges, where, predominantly, they are trained how to be teachers in the company of other Protestants or Catholics. They then go to take their placements in controlled schools with Protestants or maintained schools with Catholics.

They then go and take their placements in controlled schools with Protestants or maintained schools with Catholics. They then go and become teachers in controlled schools with Protestants or maintained schools with Catholics. Then we say to the teachers, who are the best placed people to influence the young folk in their classrooms to be better citizens and engage in cross-community activity with other people from other backgrounds, that they should go ahead and do that. The teachers are saying, of all the trades that could have been picked, we are one of the trades that has less experience of being in a place with people from another community background, and, therefore, there is a lack of confidence to do that within teachers. They have got to be trained together.