Mr. Nigel Frith:

I want to touch briefly on two things. When I was a child there were a lot of cows in the area where I lived, and one horse. The horse thought he was a cow. He had never seen that there was any possibility of anything different from a cow, so he assumed he was one. The point I take from that is that a vision for change in a place like Northern Ireland has to include a vision of what could be. On the question why more people are not opting for something different, they have not been given a vision of what could be. Therefore, the family tradition of opting for the grammar school and that being seen as the pinnacle of achievement persists because it is just that - it is tradition. There is not a solid vision of what could be. It is down to organisations like NICIE and the IEF to say that things could be different, but we are not seeing that vision from the political leadership of Northern Ireland. The political leadership of Northern Ireland continues to deliver the segregated, sometimes tribal, approach that is impeding Northern Ireland's progress.

The second point I want to touch on briefly is the question that was asked about our admissions criteria. When we are beginning a transfer process, we make it clear that we intend if possible to admit 40% Catholic, 40% Protestant and a maximum of 20% other. Within each of those groupings we have a series of admissions criteria which we begin with. First, a child who is coming to us from an integrated primary school has a very easy transfer into a post-primary school because they have begun the integrated journey and it is only right that they can continue it. Our second one is children of members of staff or governors because there has to be a perk in the system somewhere.

We admit children who are gifted and talented, but not in terms of a transfer test. It is simply a way of saying that if a child has a gift or talent in two or more subjects, there is an opportunity for them to have some preference. The point of that is not to recreate a transfer test. It is this goal of achieving an even ability intake and therefore a way of saying to parents who are thinking of a grammar school that there is an alternative and they could look at the gifted and talented programme operated by Drumragh. It is not a narrowly academic model and does not recreate the 11-plus. Children who are sporting, musical, budding engineers or academic all have an equal opportunity to present a case for being gifted and talented.

Our admissions criteria also offer the opportunity for parents to make a special case based on a child's learning difficulties, medical needs or social needs for some reason. There is an opportunity to say that they are from a mixed marriage and therefore essentially the child is receiving an integrated home environment, and for that reason the parents want the same ethos to be present in their child's education.

Those are the sorts of criteria we have built into the system. Our regret every year is when we run out of places and then have to say that one child can come in but another cannot. That seems to us to be entirely wrong.