Debate contribution: RAISE: Failure to Tackle Educational Underachievement

Debate contribution by Mr Pat Sheehan on 5 November 2024.

MLA

Mr Pat Sheehan

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

5 November 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

RAISE: Failure to Tackle Educational Underachievement

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4631575

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I beg to move

Go raibh maith agat, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle.

Educationalists, experts and academics agree that poverty is the biggest predictor of educational underachievement. The issue with the RAISE programme is that it does not give poverty and deprivation the weight that they deserve when determining what areas are eligible for funding and/or inclusion. I do not disagree with an area-based or locality-based approach to targeting educational disadvantage; indeed, the 'A Fair Start' report recommended that schools should be incentivised to:

"work more collaboratively with the communities they serve."

The difficulty now is that less-deprived areas and even some more-affluent areas are due to be included within the programme, while children and young people in many deprived areas in working-class communities are set to be excluded. "Punishing poverty and rewarding wealth", is how one school principal described the situation. As a party, we welcomed the announcement of £20 million in much-needed funding for our education system from the Shared Island unit, and the Minister deserves credit for identifying and securing new funding opportunities. However, in a system with such limited resources, we should be targeting any additional funding to where it is needed most, and, unfortunately, that simply will not happen under the RAISE programme. Instead of targeting areas of deprivation where we know educational underachievement persists and is most acute, the Education Minister has decided to spread the programme geographically and has used a flawed formula to determine eligibility. Electing to spread the scheme geographically will purposefully redirect much-needed resources away from where they are needed most. If the data is telling us where the need is, that is where the resources and associated interventions should go. I am also concerned that the apparent over-reliance on GCSE data runs counter to the concept of early intervention. Socio-economic background is a much more comprehensive predictor of educational underachievement in the long term, because it shapes the foundational conditions that influence a student's entire educational journey. The research in this area is crystal clear. It is not geography that is the best indicator of educational outcomes. Neither is it religion. Poverty and deprivation are the primary predictors of educational underachievement, and when we talk about poverty and deprivation in the context of our education system, we measure it by the level of free school meal entitlement (FSME), using free school meal entitlement as a tried, tested and trusted indicator of socio-economic status. While 'A Fair Start' did recommend that the Department should explore the potential of using other indicators, research commissioned by the Department recommended that free school meal entitlement should not be replaced as the primary indicator of socio-economic disadvantage. The credibility of the RAISE programme and public confidence in the scheme was further eroded when a list of seemingly eligible schools was published on the Department of Education's website. The list has since been removed, but the appearance on that list of a preparatory school that charges £5,000 per year in fees as, seemingly, eligible for inclusion has done nothing at all for the credibility of the programme. The Minister must go back to the drawing board. We need a plan that will deliver based on objective need. A plan that will direct funding and target support to the children and communities that need it most, and a plan that, ultimately, the public can have confidence in. Officials appeared recently at the Education Committee and, basically, told us that we did not understand how the RAISE programme is supposed to work. In relation to the list of schools published on the Department's website, which were deemed to have met the eligibility criteria for the RAISE programme, officials said that just being on that list does not mean that a school meets the eligibility criteria. Similarly, we were told that schools that were not on the published list were not necessarily excluded from the programme. Is it any wonder that people are confused about how the programme is supposed to be administered and delivered? The Minister, I am sure, will also have heard criticisms of the programme from a number of school principals in the media. Those are principals of schools in some of the most deprived areas in the North, whose schools appear to fall outside the Minister's proposed geographical catchment areas. Are they confused also? Do they not understand how the programme is to be rolled out? It is also worth mentioning the fact that the Minister told Mark Carruthers on 'The View' that he clearly did not understand how the RAISE programme is supposed to work. So, there we have it: everyone is confused and wrong, except the Minister. I have already said that the Minister should go back to the drawing board. There are plenty of examples of good practice in dealing with educational disadvantage. The Engage programme, which helped children who had fallen behind in their learning after COVID, is one good example. That was rolled out on the basis of free school meal entitlement, and it produced positive results. The Minister could also look further afield, to the South, at the delivering equality of opportunity in schools programme, known as DEIS, which aims to reduce educational disadvantage. Under the DEIS programme, schools with the highest number of students at risk of educational disadvantage get extra resources. Perhaps, given the fact that we have the longest tail of educational underachievement on these islands, the Minister might take some learning from the DEIS programme and the system in the South in general. The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) comparative study of the education systems, North and South, shows that far fewer young people are leaving school without qualifications in the South than in the North. Significantly more are going on to third-level education in the South than in the North. The ESRI report also flagged the issue of academic selection, which it deemed to be a major factor in educational underachievement here. Of course, no serious educationalist believes that academic selection at the age of 10 or 11 is of any benefit, either to the children or to the system of education that we have here. Let me conclude with a suggestion for the Minister. When he devises or invents a new scheme and funding model, it is wise to game it out and test-drive it in order to establish whether there are any anomalies or unintended consequences. When that has been done, one question needs to be asked: is this outcome fair? By any metric or yardstick, this scheme that the Minister has come up with is blatantly unfair and is not based on objective need.

1,103 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not qualifying

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:30 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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