Ruane says 11-plus in Northern schools at an end

THERE WILL be no 11-plus examination in the North's primary schools next year for the first time in over 60 years, the North's Minister for Education Catríona Ruane said yesterday.

"The reality is that this [ year's] is the last 11-plus. For a new 11-plus there needs to be legislation and I am not bringing in legislation for a new 11-plus," she told participants at the Parnell Summer School in Avondale, Co Wicklow.

"I am exploring other options. As it is, the majority of children are admitted to second level (except in grammar schools) according to criteria of geography, family and social justice," she said.

The 11-plus was introduced in Britain in 1944 and the North in 1948. It involves children in their final year at primary school taking two one-hour exams in arithmetic, writing and general knowledge. Based on performance they may be admitted to grammar schools. Most are not.

The system has been abandoned in much of Britain as unfair to children, but it is retained in the North where pupils sitting the exam are awarded grades in the following ratios: A (25 per cent), B1 (5 per cent), B2 (5 per cent), C1 (5 per cent), C2 (5 per cent), D (55 per cent).

The then education minister in the first Northern Executive, Martin McGuinness, abolished the exam. When direct rule was introduced following the collapse of that Executive in 2002, legislation was passed retaining the 11-plus until the end of this year.

Ms Ruane is now proposing not to renew this. She is being opposed by the DUP, the UUP and 30 of the North's 69 grammar schools. (There are 228 second level schools in the North, including grammar schools.)

The exam meant that "a huge layer of our children are being labelled failures at 11", she said yesterday. "I've seen those children. As Minister for Education in the North I am not prepared to preside over such a system. It is wrong." She said that "a small, powerful minority don't want change . . . political unionism has set its face against change. But change will happen." She had been to "150 schools, in every sector, and everywhere I go they all want change".

She continued that in the North a child has to start school at four, as the whole curriculum is geared to him/her doing the 11-plus at 10. The whole system was distorted "at the start", she said. Trade unions, churches "and a vast majority of people involved in education" supported its removal, something "which is ignored by the media", she added.

Fred Brown, president of the North's NASUWT teachers' union, said the profession "has opposed the 11-plus for a very long time". This "centres very much on the stress it causes children. Some teachers call it 'child abuse' and I would agree with that . . . It has disadvantaged whole areas of the child population."

Prof John Coolahan, professor of education at NUI Maynooth who was a member of the Burns Commission which recommended in 2001 that the 11-plus be abolished, expressed amazement at the opposition of the DUP to this. He wondered about the vast numbers who had suffered its detrimental effects in Protestant ghettoes. The exam was "a huge factor in consigning people to social disadvantage", he said.

Ms Ruane said she could "empathise with Donough O'Malley. Nothing happens without a fight." O'Malley was a reforming education minister in the Republic during the latter 1960s. She appealed to people on the sidelines "to stop sniping . . . and join us in the push for change".