The huge gulf between the education systems in Northern Ireland and the Republic is even more extraordinary when one realises that less than 80 years ago they were part of the same British structure.
The one element they have both retained is the confessional divide: the Catholic and Protestant churches are still hugely influential in Irish education, North and South, although in the former that influence is mediated through state structures.
The fierce battle the churches fought to control education over the past 150 years, when married to modern state educational structures and requirements, has led to extremely complex networks of often overlapping state, church, management and union interests in both jurisdictions.
In the Republic almost all primary schools are denominational. The great majority are de facto Catholic schools, under the patronage of the local Catholic bishop, with a small minority run by Protestant churches, the Jewish and Muslim communities. More than 60 per cent of secondary schools are run by Catholic religious orders, with the rest - community, comprehensive and vocational schools - having more secular management structures but still with considerable church influence.
Education in the Republic is unusual in Western Europe both for its extremely centralised administrative structure, with all but the tiniest decisions taken by Department of Education officials, and its strange combination of largely private - i.e. church - ownership and public funding. The last government's plans to dilute both departmental - and to a lesser extent church - control by vesting some powers in regional education boards were scrapped by the present Fianna Fail-led government.
The system in Northern Ireland, as befits a society riddled with sectarian division, is doubly split down the middle. Just under half the pupils go to "controlled" primary, secondary and grammar schools which are under the auspices of five regional education boards and are 100 per cent state-funded. The great majority of these pupils come from Protestant backgrounds.
Just under half go to "maintained" Catholic schools. Until recently these were only partly funded by the state: 85 per cent up to 1989. Since then they have been able to get 100 per cent of their capital costs from the government provided they have a board of governors on which, in theory at least, no single interest group has a majority. A small group of second-level students go to academically high-achieving "voluntary" grammar schools, most of which also have a strong religious ethos, Catholic or Protestant.
An even smaller group - under two per cent of the total - have seen their parents bravely bridge the religious divide and set up integrated primary and secondary schools. This is a rare example of "parent power" in the North; there are no significant parent organisations and parents usually have little input into the life of mainstream schools.
Alongside the sectarian split is an educational - and social - one. At the very early age of 11 pupils must take an exam to decide whether they should go to a more academic grammar school, and thus probably on to university, or to a more vocational secondary school. Almost every other part of the United Kingdom dropped this early selection system many years ago.
The INTO, the only teachers' union which organises on both sides of the Border, has called it one of Northern Ireland's "greatest social evils" in that it "ensures that at least two-thirds of our young people are categorised as `failures' at the age of 11 years". Not surprisingly, a high proportion of these "failures" come from deprived, working-class areas. Structures are not the only area in which the two jurisdictions have grown far apart. The Northern curriculum is part of a highly centralised national curriculum, defined and laid down by law throughout the UK as part of Margaret Thatcher's educational "revolution". In Northern Ireland it is meant to take up 85 per cent of primary teaching time, and teachers there complain bitterly that its strictly prescribed nature leaves them little room for creativity and innovation.
They say the constant curricular changes dictated by successive governments make preparing children for exams increasingly difficult. The principal of St Malachy's primary school in Newry, Leo Cowan (see below), points to the latest "six pack" of instructions on literacy, numeracy, school planning and behaviour received at Easter. "Circulars, circulars, circulars; instructions, instructions, instructions. No one seems to realise that in the middle of all these things we're trying to teach children, and we might get tired and cross and the standard of teaching might go down."
IN the Republic, on the other hand, the curriculum, like practically everything else, is governed by directives from the Minister and Department of Education. However the need to limit the curriculum to fit the certificate exams at second level, and the introduction of standardised literacy and numeracy tests at primary, are inevitably making what was a flexible system more rigid and prescriptive.
The main subject difference between the two jurisdictions is, of course, compulsory Irish in the Republic. In the North, schools also teach more cross-curricular themes like information technology and Education for Mutual Understanding, meant to increase understanding and communication between schools in a divided society, but whose take-up is patchy. The teacher unions in the Republic - a force in the land in a way the North's British-based unions can only dream of - will ensure that anything like the UK system of publishing league tables of schools' exam performance will never happen south of the Border.
The Republic compares very unfavourably with the North when it comes to resources, facilities and materials, although the gap has narrowed recently as Dublin's spending on education has grown more rapidly. However a 1994 INTO study of six primary schools in Derry and Limerick showed that the Northern schools had smaller class sizes and pupil-teacher ratios, more non-teaching principals, better promotional prospects for teachers, more equipment like TVs and videos and far more computers. Other studies have shown that school library and physical education facilities are much better in Northern Ireland.
The Republic's primary pupil-teacher ratio is the worst in Europe, at nearly 24:1, although the North's is not much better at just under 20:1. At the other end of the scale similarly high proportions of second-level students make it to school-leaving exam stage: 84 per cent in the Republic; just under 80 per cent in the North. Over the years there has been little or no contact between the two education systems. Amazingly, there is no specific module dealing with the Northern political situation in the recently introduced Civic, Social and Political Education syllabus in the Republic. In the 1980s Co-operation North started a schools exchange programme, but the two Departments of Education did little until the prospect of European money as part of the Northern peace process provided some attractive carrots.
The one exception to this has been at third level. Here the huge demand for places in Southern colleges, some Northern courses which were not available in the Republic, and the recently-reversed British "no fees" policy, attracted several thousand Southern students to Northern universities and colleges in recent years.
