Education Minister's Paul Givan and Norma Foley, TD speaking to Principal Sean Campbell and staff member at Old Warren Primary School; Caption 2: Education Minister Paul Givan and Norma Foley, TD speaking to Principal Jim Sheerin and pupils at Lisnagarvey High School.
Education Ministers from Northern Ireland and Ireland have officially announced the RAISE programme.
Education Minister Paul Givan was joined by Norma Foley TD, Education Minister in Ireland, on a visit to a number of schools in one of the identified localities today.
The RAISE initiative will deliver a range of education support measures to help address educational underachievement and tackle educational disadvantage through a whole community and place-based approach which will operate in 15 areas across Northern Ireland.
The localities are within: Antrim, Ards Peninsula, Ballymena, Belfast, Carrick, Coleraine, Derry / Londonderry, Dungannon, Enniskillen, Limavady, Lisburn, Lurgan and Craigavon, Newry, Newtownabbey and Portadown.
The RAISE programme represents an investment of £20million over the next two years, with the potential for further funding.
Officially announcing the programme, Education Minister Paul Givan said:
“Educational underachievement linked to economic disadvantage, is an issue that has persisted for many years. The RAISE programme offers an important opportunity to look afresh at the issues caused by deprivation and to drive forward a whole community, place-based approach to remove the barriers to learning and educational achievement that many of our children and young people are facing.”
The RAISE programme will be complemented by two other initiatives. Students will be able to connect through the arts as part of the “Bringing Live Arts to Students and Teachers” programme. Teachers will also benefit from the further development of the in-person and online forum for sharing education research in Ireland, known as the Teacher Research Exchange (T-REX).
The Ministers visited Old Warren Primary School, Lisnagarvey High School, Fort Hill Integrated Primary School and Fort Hill Integrated College as part of today’s official announcement.
The Minister continued:
“This programme seeks to break the link between economic disadvantage and educational under-achievement – ensuring that the aspirations and outcomes of our children and young people are not limited by their background. My department will now continue to engage with key stakeholders in each RAISE locality through a series of workshops over the coming weeks and months – to identify needs, build the evidence base and bring forward strategic plans for consideration.”
Welcoming the announcement of the RAISE programme, Minister Foley TD, Minister for Education in Ireland said:
“I am delighted that the Irish Government has been able to support this initiative through the Shared Island Fund as part of our wider long-standing cooperation with the Northern Ireland Executive on Education attainment issues.
“The ‘Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS) Programme’ in Ireland is supporting almost 260,000 students and has helped to address concentrated educational disadvantage in a targeted and equitable way across primary and post-primary schools. There are many lessons that we can jointly learn from working together with the Department of Education in Northern Ireland on how we can support education attainment.”
‘A Fair Start’ was published in 2021 by an Expert Panel examining the link between educational underachievement and socio-economic background. Its goals included drawing up an Action Plan for change to ‘ensure all children and young people, regardless of background are given the best start in life’.
The Panel advocated that addressing educational underachievement ‘means placing equality of opportunity at the core of everything we do.’ A key area in the Action Plan is ‘Promoting a whole community approach to education’. This has a “place-based focus that delivers the greatest concentration of effort in those localities with the greatest concentration of educational underachievement”.
The RAISE Programme will deliver a key action from “A Fair Start” ‘involving a whole community approach to tackle disadvantage which will be strategic in scale and collaborative in nature, mandating co-design and the building of authentic partnerships between schools and communities using a place-based approach’.