The Future of Education

Northern Ireland (NI), like a number of other European counties, is emerging from a violent period in its troubled history and remains a society characterized by segregation between its two main communities. Nowhere is this more apparent than in education, where for the most part Catholic and Protestant pupils are educated separately. During the last 30 years there has been a twofold pressure placed on the education system in NI - at one level to respond to intergroup tensions by promoting reconciliation, and at another, to deal with national policy demands derived from a global neo-liberalist economic agenda. With reference to a recent innovation to promote shared education between separate schools, the paper will explore the uneasy dynamic between a school-based reconciliation programme in a transitioning society and system-wide values that are driven by neo-liberalism and its organizational manifestation - new managerialism. We will argue that whilst the former seeks to promote social democratic ideals in education that can have a potentially transformative effect at societal level, neoliberal priorities have the potential to both subvert shared education and also to embed it.