February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Jim Smith
LAWRENCE, Mass. — During a St. Patrick’s Day visit to the new Irish Room at the South Lawrence Branch Public Library, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness read to a group of children and spoke about his role as minister of education in Northern Ireland.
"The biggest issue we are facing now is the review of post-primary education and how we should move forward in a changing world," McGuinness said. "It is my view that no education system and no society has a right to tell any child at age 10 or 11 that he or she is a failure."
At issue is the dreaded "transfer test," or "11-plus test," that determines how 11-year-olds in Northern Ireland will spend their secondary education: in prestigious "grammar schools" or in inferior "secondary modern schools," or technical schools. In England and Northern Ireland, the term "grammar school" refers to college preparatory secondary schools.
"In any given year, some 18,000 children sit for this exam, and only about one-third of them pass and go forward to grammar school education," McGuinness said. "Some 12,000 of them on a Saturday morning in springtime take possession of an envelope with a message of failure written inside. I’m told that the statistics for the Shankill Road [in Belfast], and that goes right across the entire community, suggest that only one percent of children from that area go forward to grammar school education. So it’s a serious problem."
McGuinness and many Catholic politicians in Northern Ireland believe that the current selection system is inherently unfair to Catholics and students from poor families across the North.
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Earlier this year, McGuinness ended the practice of publishing the "league tables" of schools, which highlighted superior schools and stigmatized underperforming ones, which are generally situated in disadvantaged areas.
"I have not come down in favor of any individual approach because I don’t want to pre-empt the work they are doing, because it is a very detailed consultation," he said of his office. "They’ve been involved in 25 public meetings throughout the North, and they’ve taken possession of about 1,000 written submissions. This is a hugely important debate that is going on across the North of Ireland."
McGuinness is a strong proponent of integrated schools. In recent years, a number of integrated schools have been established at primary and post-primary levels with the aim of providing education for Catholic and Protestant children together. "We’re supporting the demand for integrated education like it’s never been supported in the past," he said.
McGuinness also recently established a new board to oversee proposals for accommodating parents who wish their children to be instructed through the medium of the Irish language.
"When I came into this position, I said that the foundation of my administration would be choice, excellence, equality and accessibility," he said. "We’re moving forward now on the basis of equality, and we’re making great strides, but the biggest issue facing us now is the future of post-primary education. This involves the biggest debate about education that we’ve had in the North in over a hundred years."
McGuinness said that he was "very, very impressed" with the AOH Irish collection, which is housed at the South Lawrence Branch Library.
After touring that room, McGuinness read a children’s book, "The Salmon of Wisdom," to a group of local youngsters in the community room. He also recited one of his own poems about his mother’s hometown in Donegal.