Central Integrated Primary take campaign to the hill

At the front Cllr. John Barry, Stephen Farry MLA, Steven Agnew MLA
and Peter Campbell  (Principal)
Picture by Joanna Braniff

Earlier today a petition from supporters of Bangor Central Integrated Primary School was taken to Stormont to be handed into the speaker of the Assembly. The petition is the urge the Minister of Education and North Down Borough Council to reconsider selling the adjacent Leisure Centre site to a private company, while the school built for 300 pupils houses 600 next door on a somewhat suffocating parcel of land.

When you consider that the 600 pupils currently have to take their lunch at Bangor Academy next door. Have their sports' day on the Academy playing fields. And all around their playground are a series of huts. This is hardly an ideal situation for the only Integrated Primary School in town.

Earlier this morning the Principal Peter Campbell was on the radio pointing out that the reasons the school needed improved premises on its current location were firstly the capacity issue, also that is was currently part of an education village with Central Nursery and Bangor Academy on the same pocket of land and Glenlola Collegiate and the South East Regional College sites a few minutes walk away. It therefore allows for ease of parents dropping off and collecting children of differing ages. Plus with its unique integrated status for key stage 1 and 2 pupils it needs to be accessible to all of the town's population.

Friends in the Scottish party may remember me talking from an intervention mic during a policies for the future session about how the fact that there was a move to integrated education slightly further to the West of the West of Scotland was a reason why it made most sense to move towards it in Scotland. This school is a prime example. But while others with more land have been updated to do away with the need for temporary classrooms this one has been overlooked by successive Education ministers. This is despite promises to consider working to acquire the Leisure Centre site by the previous minister to enable that improvement.

The petition which has over 3000 signatures is calling for the DUP led North Down Borough Council to reconsider its decision to sell the site to private developers but keep it for public use for the development of the school. If the ministers for education in Northern Ireland are serious about a future where pupils from all historic communities work and learn together schools like BCIPS need to be allowed to develop. My primary school elsewhere in town has less pupils, but more space and an extension adding five new classrooms. My secondary school over in Newtownards in recent years also has had an extensive modernising extension project again doing away with the multitude of temporary classrooms. In both cases many of the temporary classrooms where present for over 20 or 30 years.

We need to do better for our children and their education, a school whose enrollment is twice what its buildings were designed for, that is continuously oversubscribed every year needs to be allow breathing space. Not just for its current pupils but so that it can provide all the service that it needs to, including its own room for sports.

Shimna an Example of True Integration

Shimna Integrated College (via NICIE)

When integrated education was first muted for Northern Ireland some people had the audacity to ask "What's the point?". The obvious response was that this was the way that we would grow a future population that will have a shared future.

That is why when I heard the news that there is a school in Northern Ireland setting up a gay-straight alliance, I suspected it would be one of the integrated secondary schools. I'm proud of the fact that the pupils at Shimna Integrated College in Newcastle are taking integration to the next stage. The integration of Northern Irish society is needed so that we can get beyond managing sectarianism and looking to the bigger picture, looking to the wider issues.

Gay-straight alliances in schools are big in the USA, they are designed to welcome all pupils irrespective of sexuality and seek to end homophobic bullying and the feeling of otherness and not belonging that many LGBT teens can feel*. To end homophobia, not just in school, but in society as a whole we need our non-LGBT friends to support us. We don't and can't live in an LGBT ghetto especially as the recent Rainbow Project report shows that there is still some work to be done to make our workplaces LGB friendly (never mind the T) in Northern Ireland.

Kevin Lambe, the  principal of Shimna has hit the nail on the head when he says:

"Most bullying, most racism has been publicly gotten rid of. Words that you are called because of your religion, because of your skin colour, most of that has disappeared.


"But homophobic bullying I'm sorry to say is quite common. As the form of bullying which most induces young people to harm themselves or even kill themselves, surely we can't turn away from that and say 'oh that's a delicate type of bullying, we can't really deal with that'."

The other great news about the setting up of the alliance at the college is that there hasn't been a single complaint from a parent. Whilst the young generation are often most tolerant about the various diversities we have in our communities sometimes those a little older still hold some form of prejudice. But the parents there see this as a natural progression a way for the pupils of Shimna to have a shared present in their education. I hope to hear of other schools across Northern Ireland following suit.

* Myself included at that age.