Pivotal has submitted a short response to the consultation launched by the Department of Education regarding Vision 2030 – A Strategy for Integrated Education. We welcome the opportunity to provide comments on the proposed strategy and wish the Department, and all other stakeholders, success in achieving the strategy’s notable goals.

The Department of Education launched a consultation to gather feedback on the “proposed actions to inform, shape and improve final policy proposals to reflect changes to the law on Integrated Education made within the Integrated Education Act (Northern Ireland) 2022.” A central plank of these actions is the requirement for the Department to better understand, and measure, the level of demand for integrated education. Pivotal welcomes the importance given to measuring demand.

Our response to the consultation is based on research we have published recently regarding how to achieve greater integration in education and housing, and the perspectives of young people educated and living in largely divided spaces on these issues. Pivotal calls for a strong commitment to growing integrated education, and to significantly growing the number of pupils from across the divide being educated together in all types of schools. We also call for greater sharing and integration to be a cross-departmental priority – across housing, infrastructure and education policy.

Our response to the consultation also calls for greater clarity on some core questions relating to the integrated sector’s admissions policy and ethos, and the meaning of duties placed on the Department. Continuing differences of how to interpret the Act will weaken this, or any other, strategy.