Third more Catholics in higher education in NI than Protestants

THERE are now around onethird more Catholic students than Protestant students in Northern Ireland’s higher education institutions.

According to figures released by the Department for the Economy for the academic year 2015/16, out of the 43,415 resident students enrolled in higher education, 47.4% (20,595) were Catholic and 30.2% (13,125) were Protestant.

The remaining 22.3% fell into ‘other’ or ‘not known’ categories.

Back in 2011/2012 the number of Catholic students stood at 49%, while the number of Protestant students stood at 33.5% — indicating a slight increase in the size of other religious demographics in Northern Ireland’s higher education institutions.

The figures aim to give a broad overview of equality categories across higher education, and show significant movement in some other areas.

For 2015/2016 the 5,140 stu- dents who self-reported as having a disability made up 9.3% of the total number enrolled.

This was a substantial jump from 2011/2012, when people with disabilities made up just 6.6% of the total body of students.

There has also been a drop in the number of students from black and minority ethnic back- grounds attending higher education institutes here.

In 2011/2012 a total of 1,035 students of Chinese or Indian ethnicity were enrolled, a figure that was down to 650 by 2015/2016.

Meanwhile, the number of teachers graduating here has dropped by 11.5% in the past five years.

In real terms, the steady decline means that there were 70 fewer teachers coming into the education system in 2015/2016 than there were in 2011/2012.

For 2015/2016, there were a total of 545 graduates from initial or pre-service teacher training courses in Northern Ireland.

Across the board, participation in higher education has remained steady over the same period with 48.8% of people aged under 21 entering into higher education in 2011/2012, compared with 48.2% in 2015/2016.

The drop in numbers has come only from those graduating to work as secondary teachers, with the total number falling by 80.