Mr. Peter Osborne:

I will add one or two things to that. I would need to go back and check over the past number of years, perhaps even the past decade or two, but that increase is a regular trend around the numbers of people who like the principle of their children going to a school where they can learn and develop with children from other backgrounds. There are a number of issues that have stopped that and not all of them are negative. Some of them are understandable. Examples of those have been touched on and include parents wanting their children to go to the same school they went to and other practical issues. It certainly could be helped by the work that the Integrated Education Fund and NICIE do at the moment. As Ms Merron said, perhaps another 30 schools are on the runway. That takes a lot of resources. The situation would be helped by extra resources. That is why funding, for example through the reconciliation fund, is important and appreciated from our end.

We do not have time to go into the issue but I touched on isolated pairs of schools. There are 64 schools, 32 pairs of schools, in rural villages and in 26 of those 32, at least one school is below the threshold for sustainability, and sometimes both schools are. If the area planning model changed to make the assumption that the first thing to be done is the exploration of the amalgamation of those schools to ensure sustainable schools in villages, which is important to those villages, that policy change to the system would be significant in terms of the numbers we could look for over the next five or ten years. Those are the critical policy changes we need to look for. That would be a part of the 20-year roadmap for how we get to the place we want to get to.

There are issues around teacher training colleges, where there is suddenly greater integration of the teachers who are going out to teach in the different sectors. The fair employment exemption in schools is long past its overdue date. We need to explore that and get rid of it to have a level playing field.

We are in a long-term process with this change and it is tough. There are some great schools across the sectors and we do not want to lose them. On the question as to whether the education system is a recipe for failure, it is not. There are great teachers and schools but we need to make some changes in dealing with issues around educational underachievement. Let us deal with the transfer test one way or another, for goodness' sake. Fundamental to this process around the Good Friday Agreement to which we are all committed is not only dealing with the symptoms of division but also its causes. One of the fundamental parts of that must be making sure that children of five years of age do not turn left and right at the bottom of the lane.