Debate contribution: RAISE: Failure to Tackle Educational Underachievement

Debate contribution by Mrs Michelle Guy on 5 November 2024.

MLA

Mrs Michelle Guy

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

5 November 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

RAISE: Failure to Tackle Educational Underachievement

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4631591

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. This is a really challenging motion because it asks us to endorse scrapping a £20 million programme that has the objective of reducing educational disadvantage. That is a massive ask, and it is one that, we feel, goes too far. The purpose of our amendment is to agree with concerns that have been raised about the criteria that have been used but to confine any repurposing to that aspect of the programme only. We want to start by talking about the positives of the RAISE programme. Its objective, which is to tackle educational disadvantage, is an ambition that, I know, we all share. Every child deserves the opportunity to thrive and fulfil their potential, and education offers a route out of poverty for children in our most disadvantaged areas. Objective need, however, must be the core principle that guides how we target interventions in this space. I also welcome the investment: £20 million is a substantial and hugely welcome investment from the Shared Island Fund in this vital area, which has been underfunded for too long. Taking a whole-community, place-based approach to this issue is welcome, and we support that. I particularly love the two concepts of community that have been articulated in that approach: the geographic place, but also the different groups and people impacting on a child's life. It is holistic and looks beyond school-based provision to parental support and early intervention initiatives. The baseline for educational inequalities in Northern Ireland is depressingly low. Evidence indicates that educational inequalities in Northern Ireland are wider than in other parts of the UK and comparable OECD countries. How do we find ourselves debating a motion to scrap a programme that is so badly needed? The answer is simple: the Department produced and published a list of schools that were eligible to benefit from the scheme, and that list excluded schools from some of the most deprived wards in Northern Ireland. For a scheme with a focus on educational underachievement, it is more than reasonable to raise questions and express concerns about how the methodology resulted in that outcome. The Department has since removed that list, but it was unacceptable that the Minister ever endorsed such a reckless communication. It resulted in schools in my constituency of Lagan Valley — the same constituency as the Minister — being the target of ire and negativity in the media and in public discourse. Those schools were not responsible for their inclusion on the list. They did not receive a penny of funding from the RAISE programme, nor would they necessarily have done so. The Department knows that, because the RAISE programme is not about uplifting school budgets in selected localities; it is expressly about acknowledging that education does not start and end at the school gates. So, publishing a list of schools at all was reckless and misleading, and it called into question the integrity of the whole programme before it had barely started. This is too important an issue to have been so carelessly handled. Poor communication aside, I am more than happy to highlight the positives and the potential of the RAISE programme, which is a product of the parent, Executive-endorsed 'A Fair Start' report. I believe that the RAISE programme has been faithful to the recommendation to develop a whole-community and place-based focused approach. I have heard first-hand from stakeholders who have participated in initial engagement sessions, and they are excited about the programme's potential to do good. In other aspects, however, the Department appears to have pivoted away from the express rationale of the expert panel.

The expert panel envisaged a reducing educational disadvantage (RED) programme that would:

"focus on communities and families in the most disadvantaged areas."

The criteria that the Department used are complicated, and, although we accept that the nature of educational disadvantage is complicated, we need to feel confident that funding is being directed at the children and young people who are impacted on the most by the effects of socio-economic deprivation and who experience the highest levels of educational underachievement. In Northern Ireland, free school meal entitlement is often used as an imperfect proxy for a child's socio-economic status or level of deprivation. 'A Fair Start' highlights the limitations of using free school meals as a measure of disadvantage and goes so far as to recommend commissioning research on the issue. The independent review concluded, however, that it would not recommend that the Department replace free school meals as its primary indicator of socio-economic disadvantage. The Department is clearly attempting to be nuanced and to reflect the complexity of educational attainment, but we need to better understand the scrutiny and modelling that the selection criteria have gone through. More fundamentally, we need to understand whether using that indicator strays from the proposal that the programme should be targeted at communities and families in the most disadvantaged areas. The briefings that the Committee has received to date have left us with more questions than answers. One of the many questions that I still have is why educational attainment plays such a prominent role in the ranking process, especially when the RAISE programme may focus on intervention in early years. For some localities, 'A Fair Start' outlines the need to tell a much broader story of success than that of attainment alone, which has too often been focused on narrow measures such as GCSEs. From looking at equivalent programmes in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, we see that Northern Ireland is an outlier in the targeting methodology adopted by the RAISE programme. Programmes in those other jurisdictions simply used established measures of deprivation to reach the most deprived children. We are not opposed to innovation of approach, but we need to have confidence that alternative approaches are robust and will deliver on objective need. The lack of clarity on the selection criteria extends to how the RAISE programme will be implemented and how success will be measured. For example, we have concerns about the use of GCSE data as the key measure of success in areas where early years programmes have been implemented. The duration of the RAISE programme is just two years right now, but longer-term tracking is needed in order to measure the impact of early years interventions. The early stages of the programme's development have been weakened by a lack of transparency and scrutiny. If the Minister was confident in the approach that he oversaw, there was an opportunity for him to brief the Education Committee and the Assembly early and bring us along with the Department's thinking. There is still an opportunity for him to do that. If, for example, the Minister can show us that the current selection criteria for the RAISE programme have been co-designed with the 'A Fair Start' report expert panel and are independently verified, we would be happy to accept that, but we are still awaiting clarity. Too often when the Minister has faced legitimate challenges about his decision-making and the Department's performance, his reflex action has not been to give a coherent defence of his decision but to make tenuous political attacks on the questioner. Our education system, with the many challenges that it faces, is too important to be used — abused, rather — as a political sledgehammer wielded against electoral rivals. Our people want more from us. We absolutely have different perspectives on some issues, but tackling educational underachievement is an issue that must unite us. We want the programme to succeed. We want to see it transform the lives of children and young people. I therefore hope that the motion passes with our amendment having been made. In short, our asks are for an urgent review of the criteria to ensure that the programme is driven by objective need and for the Minister to update the Education Committee and the Assembly on the actions that he is taking to alleviate concerns about the programme. The RAISE programme has had a rocky start, but we now have an opportunity for a reset, not only to rebuild trust in the programme but to reset how we will work together to make it a success.

1,363 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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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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