Debate contribution: Educational Achievement: West Belfast

Debate contribution by Mr Matthew O'Toole on 4 June 2024.

MLA

Mr Matthew O'Toole

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

4 June 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Adjournment

Heading

Educational Achievement: West Belfast

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4494703

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I, too, really welcome being able to contribute to the debate. Educational attainment is a really important subject in respect of West Belfast and the North more broadly. Since Members — including some who do not represent West Belfast — are sharing personal stories about their connection to education in West Belfast, I will share mine. Although I represent South Belfast, some schools in the south-west Belfast part of the constituency have an intake from West Belfast. That includes Malone Integrated College and Rathmore Grammar School. A significant number of kids who live in the West Belfast constituency go to Rathmore and Malone. My aunt was, for years, a French teacher in St Rose’s, which no longer exists and is now part of All Saints College. She used to organise exchange trips over to Brittany for girls from St Rose's and St Louise’s Comprehensive College. When I was, I think, 12— a wee culchie from Downpatrick — I was persuaded, possibly against my better judgement, to go on a one-man exchange trip to Brittany with a bus full of girls from St Rose's and St Louise’s. We are talking about educational attainment: well, I certainly got an education from that bus-full of girls from West Belfast, who were not long educating me in what I was right and wrong about. It was great craic. It has been said that educational attainment in West Belfast has improved but is not where it needs to be. It is also true that West Belfast, despite progress and the amazing contribution of educators and community groups there, who have been named, deprivation levels are far too high, as they are in other parts of this region, and educational attainment is not high enough. Educational attainment is not where it needs to be in this region more generally, but it is —

I will, yes.

I completely acknowledge that. The point of my remarks was not to single out West Belfast as an area of underachievement, because the Member is right that, clearly, there is real attainment going on there. However, it is true that attainment is not good enough in the North generally. He has been one of the most consistent advocates, as his colleague Aisling Reilly was earlier, of the idea that the long tail of underachievement in this region is intimately connected to our system of selection and the fact that we have a pernicious system that divides kids at age 11 and promotes a form of selection that no serious objective analyst or academic who is looking at educational outcomes thinks is a good way of running your education system or, frankly, your economy. It is important to put that on the record. Kids in West Belfast suffer from that, in part because it is also an area of higher than average deprivation. It is important to say that, and it would not be honest of us not to say it. I want to draw on a couple of particular themes that have been talked about today. Some of the important initiatives that go on in West Belfast have rightly been highlighted. Obviously, West Belfast, in addition to all the great schools there, has one of the North's two teacher training colleges, and I know that St Mary's plays a huge part — the summer schemes at St Mary's have been outlined — in the broader community work of improving attainment and joint working between agencies, schools and, indeed, community groups. There are specific issues that, we know, affect kids across this region, particularly in working-class families, such as the cost of school uniforms and holiday hunger, and those structural challenges exist in West Belfast too. My colleague Paul Doherty, councillor for Black Mountain, who does amazing work in Foodstock on the Andersonstown Road, has done particular work on, for example, holiday hunger and school uniform drives. That is a real challenge. We had questions to the Minister yesterday about that. That is one of the real pressures that face families in the west of the city, as it is in other parts of this region. It is important to say that, in getting to the root of some of the issues that we face in West Belfast and across the North regarding educational achievement, we need to see specific targets. I will look to a Programme for Government, when it finally emerges, to see what the specific targets are for the Executive. I acknowledge that there are real funding constraints facing the Minister and other Ministers, but it is important that we see specific, measurable outcomes. Hopefully, some of those will be outcomes converted from the independent review of education and the report, 'A Fair Start'. Gerry Carroll acknowledged and was right to say that there are concerns around the underfunding of some of the recommendations in 'A Fair Start'. I acknowledge that there is not endless money. The way in which we are funded in this place imposes constraints. We, as an Opposition, have never been unrealistic about that, but that means that it is even more important that there are clear and measurable targets for families and educators in West Belfast and other parts of the North. They need to know what the targets are, what will be prioritised and what will be delivered. There are specific things that I would like to see tackled in this mandate, but I suspect that they will not be, in part because I do not think that the Minister will be able to get political agreement; in fact, I am not sure that the Minister would give that political agreement in the Executive. What are the specific actions that will be taken to improve educational attainment in places like West Belfast? In commending the debate and acknowledging the huge progress that has been made and the real work done by educators in West Belfast, I should also talk about the impact of lost programmes and lost funding for things like Healthy Happy Minds and holiday hunger. Real work has been done by educators and community groups and by schools like St John the Baptist Primary School on Finaghy Road North, which has had to do its own fundraising and plug gaps caused by lost funding. While acknowledging all the positive work that is happening and the positive progress in West Belfast and other parts of the city, I would like to see specific plans in a Programme for Government. If the Minister is able to shed any light on that, that would be most helpful.

1,094 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 10:36 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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