Go raibh maith agat agus ar dtús cuirim fáilte chuig an process san oileán seo agus idir an dhá oileáin.
I thank the Chairman for his welcome as a Mayo woman to a Galway man. It is nice to be here and it is a very important time in the peace process for this island and the neighbouring island. What emerges from the negotiations is very important and I hope we can reach agreement so that there is a better island for all of us. I thank the Chairman for his comments and I shall convey his good wishes back to the North.
When the institutions — the Assembly, the North-South Ministerial Council and the British-Irish Council — recommenced in May 2007, all the Ministers in the Executive faced unique challenges and opportunities within their Departments, with local Ministers accountable to local people making decisions.
Nuair a cuireadh tús leis an rialtas cineachta, bhi dúshláin agus deiseanna éagsúla roimh na hAirí ar fad sa Choiste Feidhmiúcháin thar na ranna éagsúla rialtais. Bheadh Airí áitiúla, a bheadh freagrach do dhaoine áitiúla, ag glacadh cinnti. Seachas mar a bhi amhlaidh le hAirí faoin riail dhíreach, bheadh daoine áitiúla ábalta teacht ar Airí áitiúla agus níos tabhachtaí ná sin go mbíonn siad amuigh sna pobail.
One of the principal challenges facing education was the need to reform a system put in place more than 60 years ago and still in place today. We now have an opportunity to truly transform our system in the North of Ireland. I have been undertaking a radical programme of change and improvement across the whole education sector in the North. The inequalities inherent in the rigid system of education, which had changed little in 60 years, could no longer be tolerated. I set out an agenda of change which would seek to remove educational underachievement and deliver excellence, not for the few, but for all, placing all young people at the core. As a result, the 11-plus examination has now gone. It is many moons since we had the equivalent here in the South. There is now no state-sponsored testing of children and I am sure that all of us in this room agree with that.
We intend to build a modern and flexible education system, with interconnecting policies which are fit for purpose in the 21st century. We have 1,278 schools in our system. A small minority of those are attempting to block change and hold the education system to ransom, but we will not allow this to happen.
Central to achieving our aims is the need to derive the maximum benefit from co-operation between our education sectors in Ireland. There is so much good practice that we can share across this island. There is enormous potential for joint working and we are keen to realise this. It is a priority for me that our two education systems work together and harmonise to share best practice and tackle common problems.
Tá an oiread dea-chleachtais ann ar féidir linn a chomhroinnt — agus atá a chomhroinnt againn le beagnach tri bliana anuas ó ceapadh mar Aire Oideachais mé. Ach thiocfadh linn cur leis an gcomhoibriu atá á dhéanamh againn agus sin go díreach ba mhian liom a dhéanamh.
There is a great deal of co-operation in education, both formally within the North-South Ministerial Council and informally through a range of contacts and initiatives, and I want to continue to encourage both strands. In the formal arena, the North-South Ministerial Council recently celebrated its 10th anniversary and I attended an event in Armagh in recognition of this. In the education sector much progress has been made across the four mandated areas of educational underachievement, special educational needs, school, youth and teacher exchanges, teacher qualifications and teachers' superannuation.
I believe firmly that children, young people, parents and teachers in Ireland should be treated equally — there is no justification for inequality and there should be no obstacles to mobility. The North-South Ministerial Council has sought to make this a reality and I welcome this. However, there is much still to do and both Departments are committed to effective and productive engagement to strengthen co-operation further.
The Middletown Centre for Autism in County Armagh is a ground-breaking North-South project. The services provided by the centre have the potential to greatly improve the educational opportunities of all children and young people with autism in Ireland by working in close co-operation with other key services and the wider education sector. It is funded on a 50:50 basis by both Departments and is under joint management.
The centre currently provides a research and information service and training and advice for parents, teachers and other professionals. So far, this has benefited more than 2,300 individuals. I welcome the lifting of the DES pause in funding, and I look forward to the full and complete roll-out of services, including an educational assessment service and learning support service, as soon as possible.
In addition to providing facilities and services for children with autism at Middletown, our Departments have engaged regularly on initiatives to tackle autism. Last November we held an autism conference on enabling communication, attended by some 400 teachers, parents and educational professionals from across Ireland. This followed on from a very successful joint conference, "Education through the spectrum", held in Croke Park in April 2008. I cannot explain the dynamism witnessed at that conference, in the coming together of people from all the different parts of this island. There was a real buzz about the event.
Through the North-South Ministerial Council, we have taken steps to reduce levels of educational underachievement and raise standards, particularly among those children who face the greatest barriers to learning, such as Traveller children, newcomer children and those with special educational needs. I recall that when the Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Batt O'Keeffe, visited Downpatrick, rather than holding our meetings in hotels we held them in schools and educational centres. We held one in De La Salle, Downpatrick, where both of us as Ministers found the presentations to be really good. We brought school leaders together from across the island to share good practices and make presentations to us.
The programmes of work undertaken by the educational underachievement working group on attendance, retention, literacy and numeracy will serve to improve provision across Ireland. In November 2008 the two Departments jointly hosted a North-South conference in Cavan, which I was privileged to attend, on the teaching of numeracy in primary schools. If we do not get it right at primary level the problems just move on to post-primary.
Last March, we held a joint conference on best practice in Traveller education in Newry. Again there was great dynamism at that conference, which I also attended. Later this month there will be a joint conference on numeracy in the post-primary sector in Enniskillen. Later this year, because of the enormous focus on literacy and numeracy, an all-island children's book week will target children with little or no tradition of reading at home, or who have limited access to reading materials. A task force has been set up to examine the particular needs of Travellers in the North, and the chairperson will be a woman from this part of Ireland. I am delighted that there will be colleagues from the South present and as I have indicated, we are working very closely with the Department here.
The reconstituted working group on teacher qualifications is due to hold its first meeting in the near future to agree a programme of co-operation focusing on teacher education issues generally. The standing conference on teacher education, North and South, SCoTENS, continues to make a valuable contribution to teacher education research, conference activity and funding of the North-South student teacher exchange programme. I had the pleasure of addressing the seventh SCoTENS annual conference in Malahide last October, on the theme, "Reflective Practice: the Challenges for Teacher Education".
There was a great dynamic when teachers came together from across the island. Both Departments are liaising closely with a view to facilitating provision in the North of preparatory courses for the Irish language qualification requirement for teaching in schools in the South. Through the NSMC, much work has been done to inform teachers who wish to transfer to work in the South of the pension options available to them. A variety of additional publicity activities are taking place this year.
In recent years there has been a range of exchange activities at all levels of the education system. Our inspectorates have undertaken regular exchanges, including trial paired exchange visits. They recently held a joint workshop to report on the success of the exchange programme and agree a programme of future exchanges. Those people availing of exchanges through the North-South exchange consortium have found their experience to be of significant benefit to their personal development. I visited a school in Warrenpoint that had a pairing of inspectors, and the school found it very useful. I hope we continue and intensify that work.
While the work of the North-South Ministerial Council reflects the formal areas of co-operation in education, there is a significant amount of other work which goes on between the two Departments. A joint study has just begun which will scope all areas of current co-operation to give an overview and assessment of the key themes and patterns of current and recent North-South cooperative activity. It will then identify agreed themes for potential future co-operation, with a costed programme of action focusing on clearly defined benefits for the education sector. A draft interim report is due in June this year, and Deputy O'Keeffe and I are due to receive the final report by early 2011.
Tá an teanga beo i dTuaisceart na h-Éireann. Last Friday I was at a celebration to commemorate 40 years since the establishment of the Belfast Gaeltacht and the North's first Gaelscoil, Bunscoil Phobal Feirste. We have come a long way since that first group of five committed and enthusiastic Irish speaking families established a Gaeltacht community on the Shaw's Road in Belfast. Bunscoil Phobal Feirste owes its very existence to that group of parents who had the courage and vision to decide they wanted their children to be educated in Irish, and founded the school. Although the figures are not available for the past 40 years, in the past 25 years more than 8,000 pupils have passed through the school.
In 1999, my colleague Martin McGuinness, MLA, became the Minister for Education in the North. During his period in office, Mr. McGuinness reduced the viability numbers required to establish new Irish-medium schools. This change has seen the number of children able to avail of Government-funded Irish-medium education more than double. The number of grant-aided schools has increased from eight to 22, and units from two to 11. Since I took up office in 2007, there has been a steady increase in those educated in Irish in the North. There are now 2,253 pupils attending Irish medium primary schools, with a further 681 in Irish medium primary units. There are 561 pupils in Irish medium post-primary schools, with a further 145 in Irish medium post-primary units. The number of Irish medium youth groups is also increasing. We recently opened a wonderful new Irish-speaking centre in Derry, with the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs.
Unfortunately, the needs of a significant number of Irish speaking primary school children are not being met due to a lack of post-primary education through Irish and this is something I am exploring with Comhairle na Gaelscolaíochta. This is a statutory duty for my Department. We are doing everything we can to ensure that this need will be met. As well as approving the development proposals relating to Irish medium nursery provision, seven new Irish medium preschool playgroups have received funding from my Department since 2007. These are located right across the North of Ireland — in Belfast, Limavady, Magherafelt, Ballymena, Newry, Cookstown and Kilkeel. The total number of Irish medium preschools now stands at 29, with a total of 410 children in attendance. We also have three new nursery units in Derry, Armagh and Belfast and three new primary schools in Glengormley, Crumlin and Derry.
There is a scarcity of Irish medium teachers, and we are working closely with the Irish Government on this. However, we approved additional places for the Irish-medium primary education degree programme, with the result that overall intakes for Irish medium courses have increased by 70%, from 30 in 2003-04 to 51 in 2009-10. This increase in pupil numbers supports a greater desire to meet the needs of those demanding education in Irish. Last year, my Department completed work on a wide-ranging review of Irish medium education provision. The review produced 24 recommendations aimed at developing the sector and providing high quality provision and outcomes for children. I would like to thank the Department of Education and Science here, because it played an active role in that review. We are working closely with it to develop a curriculum, because there is little point producing material on our own when there are only 5 million people on the island and a small percentage work through Irish.
An Irish Language Act for the North remains one of the key outstanding issues from the St. Andrews Agreement. The two Governments need to fulfil their duties in order to resolve this issue. I was at the meeting of the British-Irish secretariat, as were the Taoiseach, Mr. Martin McGuinness and Mr. Nelson McCausland, and language was one of the issues raised with our Welsh and Scottish counterparts. There are language Acts in Wales, Scotland and this part of Ireland, but we do not have one in the North. It is an outstanding issue for a society coming out of conflict. The best way to deal with that issue is to legislate for it.
I am very keen to remove obstacles to mobility for families in Border areas. This is particularly so in respect of school transport admissions to schools. I have raised this matter with the Minister for Education and Science and am pleased that our officials are now giving serious consideration to these matters.
We have made progress on North-South co-operation in education across a wide range of areas. As part of a recent restructuring exercise in my Department, an equality and all-Ireland directorate was established to give a clearer focus to our equality agenda and to maximise the benefits of an all-island approach to education. I realise that there is much still to be done and I hope the joint North-South study will point the way to future areas of collaboration. It is good to have Ms Maura McCusker with us today as she is heading up that survey. This is Mr. Paul Sweeney's first week in the job as permanent secretary, and it is also good to have him with us today. There is much work to be done, but I hope the joint North-South study will point the way to future areas of collaboration. We must continue to work together, to expand co-operation to all areas, thus fulfilling the aspirations of the Good Friday Agreement and the St. Andrews Agreement. Sin an méid atá le rá agam. Go raibh míle maith agaibh.
