Change in education: an opportunity or a threat
How I See It with Denzil McDaniel • Published 16 Feb 2012 09:30
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On Sunday afternoon, talk in our house turned to school exams. My 14-year-old daughter is heading into Year 11 (fourth year to you and me) and is considering her selection of GCSE subjects.
The youngest boy, aged 10, is in P6 and he did his first practice paper this week for the transfer test.
It struck me that, despite all the upheaval in education in recent years, this process isn't that much different from the one my older two went through years ago.
In fact, it doesn't seem a million miles away from my own eleven-plus experience away back in the day.
To put it more crudely than I should, the supposed "clever" lot who passed went on to grammar school and the, er, not so clever went to secondary school and concentrated on subjects such as woodwork.
Yes, yes, I know it's an exaggeration and things have moved forward.
When I was at Portora, I remember one old teacher telling me, "McDaniel, it's important here that we educate the whole man."
He was trying to encourage me to participate in some cultural activity, but I just used the line as an excuse when I didn't do so well at an exam.
In these days of schools driven by academic excellence, however, sometimes
I wonder, could education be moved on even more radically if we as parents didn't focus so narrowly on things.
It would seem we still want grammar schools for the apparently more academic. We still want smaller schools in our own patch. We still want them educated with kids of the same sex and religion.
There's a problem here, however.
Money. Or should I say lack of resources. For starters, we cannot sustain the present system and we're being faced to look at our whole system in a radical way. I do accept that many people are looking at the future in a genuine attempt to improve education and put the individual child at the centre of it.
We're getting some flavour in recent days of how our system in Fermanagh will look in the future.
At the moment, I think we have 15 post-primary schools to educate 4,200 children from 11 years of age up to 18 or 19.
One possible scenario is that the Catholic sector will see the amalgamation of Mount Lourdes and St. Fanchea's into one school and St. Michael's and St. Joseph's into another.
There would be a third school in Lisnaskea, and there is the possibility of Irvinestown and Dromore combining.
It has far-reaching consequences.
There are fewer Protestant children in Fermanagh, and what is being talked about is combining Portora and the Collegiate, with Devenish College serving all the other pupils.
The future would seem fairly bleak for Lisnaskea High School even in the medium term.
This whole scenario is fraught with problems.
Numerous closures of schools across the county will have a major impact on rural life. It will also mean more and more that children of different religions will be educated together, and while I for one would really welcome that, you have to accept that many people feel their community would be diminished in some way.
And if you think Enniskillen is a traffic bottleneck in the mornings now, imagine what it would be like if 80 per cent of the county's children were being bussed into town in the mornings and out in the afternoon.
The changes will mean a number of very significant changes in the way we operate. I'm told "area-based planning" is considered the best way forward. It would mean Catholic schools and Protestant schools (I know they should be called state controlled) co-operating in a place like Lisnaskea particularly. It could mean children from Belleek being educated at a closer school across the Border.
All of this tends to focus on school location.
But there is massive opportunity here for visionary thinking outside the box.
We should abandon the nonsense of testing children at 11 and replace it with proper assessments of how chilren can take the subjects best suited to them.
We should deliver a great range of subjects with excellence of every pupil at the centre of it.
There are undoubtedly many worries in many homes across Fermanagh today about the changes that are coming to their local schools.
But, you know, this could be a real opportunity instead of a threat.
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