Schooling, the churches and the state in Northern Ireland:a continuing tension?

Abstract

After a period of generally collaborative, professionally based relations between the main churches and successive governments in Northern Ireland since the late 1960s, a feature of the recent politics of education has been the renewed concern of the Protestant churches about the protection of their interests in the state school system, which most Protestant children attend. As one of the reforms of school governance in the 1980s, the setting up of the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools created a middle‐tier organization in the school system, which, in spite of its limited remit, has been able to establish itself as the ‘voice’ of the Catholic school system. In addition, government has supported the development of a religiously integrated group of schools with its own ‘parent’ body, the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education. In their response to these developments the main Protestant churches have sought to obtain government recognition of an ‘umbrella’ Protestant church body to reassert the Protestant nature of the schools which they once owned, but transferred to the state. In this paper we outline the main developments in church—state relations since the formation of the government of Northern Ireland, describe the changes introduced since 1980, and explore the responses of headteachers and governors, and of church and government representatives, to the questions which have been raised by recent church initiatives. Finally, we consider the extent to which the concerns of the Protestant churches are likely to be formally addressed.