Debate contribution: Academic Selection

Debate contribution by Mr Nick Mathison on 3 February 2026.

MLA

Mr Nick Mathison

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

3 February 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Academic Selection

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5362488

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I am happy to confirm at the outset that the Alliance Party supports the motion and the amendment, and we thank the Members who tabled the motion. I will address the comments that Mr Burrows made to Cara Hunter during her contribution. I will clear it up before he engages in that again: I am the product of a grammar-school education. I will not pretend that I have a story about going to a school of hard knocks. I am the son of a GP, and I went to the local grammar school. The system worked perfectly for me, but I do not think that we should make educational policy based on one Member or another's anecdotal experience of the education system. That is a very lazy way to make policy. We need to make policy based on the evidence of the outcomes that it delivers for children across the system. Before getting into the detail, I also want to address the phrase "academic selection". It is a phrase that I am not really comfortable with. It creates an impression that we have a system that is able to select children based on innate ability that is identified at the age of 11. I am not sure that the current system of testing with SEAG is robust or provides objective measures of ability, nor do I think that it is desirable to try to fix a child's ability and potential at that stage of their educational journey. That seems to me to be completely at odds with the ambitions that we should have for all our children and young people. While many will argue, as Mr Brooks has done today, that our process of academic selection promotes social mobility, the evidence concludes otherwise.

I thank the Member for her intervention. Absolutely, I agree. In these types of debates, so many lazy assumptions are made that one thing equals success and another does not. We should simply look for success for all our children and young people. We should aspire to the notion that every school should be a good school, rather than try to siphon children off according to some preconceived notions of academic ability. I will probably be up against time now. With regard to social mobility, Ulster University research recently highlighted that about 37% of pupils in non-selective schools are entitled to free school meals compared with 13% of pupils who attend grammar schools. Therefore, any idea that we are not segregating children to some degree based on their economic background does not hold water. I want to bring in an element that other Members have not touched on, which is the financial and budgetary element. The demographics are changing, and we are seeing a decline in pupil numbers. We anticipate potentially a 25% reduction in primary-school numbers in the next 10 to 15 years. That connects to academic selection in a profound way, because, while there is a cultural assumption that grammar school should be prioritised and that that is where you should seek to send your child, ultimately, grammar schools and selective schools could just lower the threshold every year and simply become full schools. Then, the non-selective sector would have a smaller pool of pupils that it is trying to attract to their schools. In a system where money follows the pupil, that could have profound impacts on a non-selective school's budget. We have to be serious about that, if we are serious about tackling the financial crisis in education. When announcing the TransformED proposals last year, the Minister said very clearly, in a statement that I agree with:

"The message is simple but powerful: more time for deeper learning and less pressure to teach to the test." — [Official Report (Hansard), 9 September 2025, p11, col 1].

I cannot disagree with that. However, I also cannot connect that to the approach that we take at primary school, when sometimes from P5 and certainly from P6 and P7 onwards, there is almost an exclusive focus on teaching to the SEAG test — an exclusive focus on numeracy and literacy — to the exclusion of other areas of the curriculum. If we want to have more time for deeper learning, we need to put our money where our mouth is and do that at all stages of the education system; indeed, Lucy Crehan, when carrying out her review of the Northern Ireland curriculum, spoke to that directly. She acknowledged that, while it was not in her remit to deal with academic selection, it has an impact on the curriculum in primary school and it is not a positive one: in fact, it is quite the opposite.

As a party, Alliance has a vision for the future of our education system, one where pupils can succeed when they receive high-quality teaching in a supportive learning environment where there are high expectations of all pupils no matter what their economic background is and where that is combined with a nurturing and caring environment where there is a focus on pupils' mental well-being. That vision of success for our young people, regardless of their economic context, where they were born or the postcode area in which they grew up does not require us to engage in any form of testing of children in a high-stakes test at age 10 or 11 to somehow identify a sense of innate academic ability. Children should learn together with children from a diverse range of backgrounds in their community, where they can learn from one another and truly be prepared to live rich and fulfilled lives in society. Back at St Andrews, agreements were made that have effectively allowed academic selection in by the back door in Northern Ireland. We had the opportunity —

— to reform, and we missed it. It is now time to —

— grasp the nettle.

I thank the Member for giving way. Before he moves on from the point about choice, will he agree that, if you do not achieve the requisite score in your transfer test, a range of schools is immediately ruled out and you do not have choice? If the nearest non-selective school says that you must put it down as your first choice, once you have done that, you are ruled out from applying to other schools with the same criteria, and your choice is, in fact, limited.

1,065 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 14:26 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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