Parents and pupils at a Catholic boys’ grammar school in Downpatrick in Northern Ireland staged a protest last week against its merger with two non-selective schools in the town.
The proposal would see St Patrick’s Grammar School, known as “Red High”, merged with St Mary’s High and De La Salle High to form a 1,600-pupil co-educational voluntary grammar school.
The former education minister at Stormont, Michelle McIlveen, approved the proposal in October last year.
On 12 January more than 200 parents and pupils protested outside the Co Down headquarters of the Department for Education, with many arguing that the combined school, split across three sites in the town, would undermine any “sense of community”.
The merger was first proposed in 2018 by the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools (CCMS), with the De La Salle congregation and the Diocese of Down and Connor.
Parents wrote in protest at the time to the Bishop of Derry, Donal McKeown, who chairs the CCMS.
Some complained that “Catholic boys are being denied a Catholic grammar school education” by the merger, so that Catholic families would send their sons to selective non-Catholic schools instead.
Bishop McKeown defended the measure, saying that it followed the Church’s educational model “to prioritise the needs of the disadvantaged”.
“If some people choose not to go with the proposed way forward, that is their choice,” he said. “That does not mean the trustees should fail to do the right thing.”
Opposition to the plan has persisted. In a consultation by Northern Ireland’s Education Authority, 106 of 120 responses opposed the plan, and members of Red High PFA, the school’s parents’ association, have repeatedly voiced objections.
The principal of St Patrick’s Grammar has also expressed disquiet about the proposal.
The Department of Education NI said in a statement: “Once decisions are taken on development proposals they are required to be implemented. It is not within the power of the department or the permanent secretary to reverse decisions.”
A statement from the CCMS in October said that the merged school “will have a vision and ethos of inclusion and educational excellence” and “offers the potential for all children from a family to be educated together at post-primary level”.
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