Growing Integrated Education: Perseverance, partnership and philanthropy

The recent announcement by the UK Chancellor, Philip Hammond, that HM Treasury would invest a further £66 million in capital infrastructure for mainly integrated schools in Northern Ireland is a triumph of perseverance, partnership and philanthropy.  Such things do not happen by accident – it takes years and years of hard effort from parents, schools, supporters and charitable organisations, to achieve. (more…)

Integration Works for Everybody

The Integrated Education Fund has developed a vision of an education system free from religious, social and cultural divisions.  We know, from extensive research, that the vast majority of parents want to see this become a reality – we now need an Administration and Finance Officer who will work with the Head of Operations to support all elements of the Fund’s work to achieve this. (more…)

Pupils from integrated primary schools around Northern Ireland gathered for a gardening session at the Greenmount Campus of CAFRE in Antrim recently – and collected some green prizes while they were there.

Schools who had won awards in the annual scarecrow contest at the Allianz Garden Show Ireland earlier this year, were given trees for their grounds and every group that travelled to Greenmount for the prize ceremony on 16 November got the chance to plant up a trough of colourful cyclamen to take back to school with them. Prizes were kindly donated by CAFRE. (more…)

The Department of Education has published a statistical release which details the basic provisional enrolment figures for schools and for children in funded pre-school education for 2018/19.

The data is taken from the school enrolments census which was conducted in October 2018.

Data collected through the school census exercise are used by the Department of Education (DE) to inform a wide range of policy areas, including finance allocations, school estate development and planning, special education, school improvement, area based planning, extended schools, additional educational needs, early years and integrated and Irish medium education. (more…)

The Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education’s Big Small Stories project launched three films at an event in Lagan College on 22nd November 2018. (more…)

The Integrated Education Fund has heard with great sadness of the death of Margaret Kennedy, one of the founders of integrated education in Northern Ireland.  Margaret was crucial to the early days of the All Children Together (ACT) movement which led to the establishment of Lagan College, which opened in 1981.  She was a teacher herself and a committed member of the Church of Ireland – one of the earliest Protestants to join ACT.  She was active in many early meetings with the church hierarchy as ACT sought support for the 1978 Education Act, which enabled schools to transform to integrated ethos.  It was important to ACT that integrated schools were Christian in character and had pastoral support from clergy of all denominations. (more…)