Academic selection retains

AFTER a decade of uncertainty a glimmer of light has appeared at the end of the tunnel for tens of thousands of parents who want their children to receive grammar school education after primary school.

Opponents of academic selection celebrated in 2008 when Sinn Fein Education Minister Caitriona Ruane made good on her party colleague Martin McGuinness’s promise to abolish the 11-plus.

She claimed she had ended stress for Primary 7 children. Ms Ruane’s frequent cry then was “think about the children”.

It should be remembered that she sent her own children to Dundalk Grammar School.

Yet, because of Ms Ruane’s actions, any child in Northern Ireland who wanted to go to a grammar school had to sit unofficial transfer exams in an unknown test centre, instead of sitting a State-run test in the familiar surroundings of their own school.

One set of tests is used mainly by Catholic schools, while a second is favoured by controlled grammars.

However, for children in areas such as south Belfast, where there is a wide mix of schools, many had to sit both the two GL tests and the three AQE tests. That’s five tests sat in unfamiliar surroundings. Talk about stress.

Then there was the discomfort for educationalists and parents caused by successive Sinn Fein Education Ministers Ms Ruane and John O’Dowd frequently voicing their disapproval of the unofficial transfer tests.

There was even a ban imposed on primary schools preparing pupils within school hours to sit these tests, and a number of primaries received warning letters from the Department of Education over allegations they had ignored the ban.

Amid this atmosphere, talks between the two examination bodies to find an agreed