Northern Ireland's Schooling Disaster
I grew up in Portadown, County Armagh with mixed heritage. I am the son of a Turkish father, and a Northern Irish mother. My entire schooling experience took place within strictly Protestant/Unionist institutions. "Are you a Catholic, or Protestant Muslim", my classmates would ask. That question followed me through childhood. It was asked on football pitches, at birthday parties, in classrooms. Not often out of malice, usually, out of genuine confusion. In a society that had organised itself around peace walls and binary, I represented a stark contrast. My peers posing the question didn't really understand what they were asking. They just knew that they were supposed to ask me it.
I didn't understand what a Catholic was, until I was maybe ten years old, I had never seen one, or so I thought. But I understood that they were different to us, and that my classmates didn't like them, so neither did I.
Twenty-seven years on from the Good Friday Agreement, 93% of Northern Ireland's schools remain segregated along religious and political fault lines. This is not an archaic inherited legacy, it's a choice, and a choice that's made freshly every single year, by the institutions in Stormont that benefit from division.
Northern Ireland has moved on. Polling consistently shows that 67% of people in Northern Ireland support integrated education as the main model. In 2022, the Assembly passed the Integrated Education Act, legally requiring the Department of Education to "encourage and facilitate" integrated schooling. The demand is there. The need is there. The legislation is there. So what's stopping Northern Ireland from transcending this barrier?
One individual in particular is the Education Minister, Paul Givan of the DUP. He leads a department legally mandated to support integration, as a member of the party that tried to block the legislation. In January 2025 he vetoed integration requests from Bangor Academy, where both students and parents had voted overwhelmingly in support of integration. While Bangor Academy already had significant diversity, the Minister felt there wasn't a "reasonable number of a minority community," a decision legal challenges upheld. The political quagmire of Stormont means that ministers like Paul Givan can fail to deliver on crucial executive promises like this, with little accountability. The real victims of his inaction are the young people much like myself.
The other main opponents are the churches. Over half of the public blame religious institutions for upholding segregation. Both the Catholic maintained sector and the Protestant-affiliated controlled sector hold a duopoly, complete with separate teacher training colleges, separate governance structures, and admissions processes. Integration is posed as an attack against "ethos" or "parental choice", but I'm confident that I won't be the first person to say this - a multitheological religious education does not attack particular religious groups.
In my town, which is two-thirds Unionist, there is no Integrated or Catholic high-school. Every September, the Catholic children of Portadown usually travel past at least three closer high schools in order to receive an education. In smaller towns or villages, facilities are often duplicated, with two tiny schools, instead of a large one. We have spent thirty years dismantling the nature of the troubles; tearing down peace walls, decommissioning paramilitary groups, reforming the entire police service. Yet still, we call segregation tradition. We call it heritage.
Luckily, it is not all doom and gloom. Others like me and my sixth-form politics classmates have been fortunate to be introduced to cross-community organisations like Politics in Action. Together with a school from County Donegal, we created a shared youth manifesto, which was adopted by our local elected representatives in both Portadown, Northern Ireland, and Milford, Ireland. I remember a walking debate on Irish unification. It left me dumbstruck. The majority of my peers from a Catholic school in Donegal did not support immediate Irish unification. It shattered my perceived understanding of the question. These organisations are wonderful, and they do an awful lot of good for young people across Northern Ireland.
Unfortunately, these programmes reach a tiny sliver of young people, leaving those students who aren't able to stumble upon the right extra-curricular, disadvantaged. Integrated education must cease to be a niche alternative or tick-box exercise, but the default approach. My generation, born in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, did not inherit our parents' war, but we inherited their sectarian systems. Northern Ireland has proven it can transcend violence, but it can't stop segregating.
Enough is enough. Democratic deficit and institutions that reward sectarianism are stealing from Northern Ireland's young people. I speak for many of us when I say that we're all fed up. We couldn't care less about someone's background, just their character. Segregated education is not just a policy failure, but a moral disaster.
Kazim Tug is a Politics and Sociology student at University College London and inaugural Baret Scholars alum.
