In part 1 of this article, Mark Langhammer explored the Michael Gove education reforms in England, 2010-14, and their ‘philosophical’ or ideological underpinnings.  This article considers the education reforms currently proposed by the DUP Education Minister, Paul Givan for Northern Ireland—widely seen as a “cut and paste” version of the Gove reforms.

What is Paul Givan proposing?  

Northern Ireland Education Minister Paul Givan’s recent reforms in Northern Ireland, within the ‘TransformED’, programme, have been described as the biggest overhaul of Northern Ireland’s education system in more than a generation.  The stated aims of TransformED focus on improving the curriculum, assessment, qualifications, school improvement, and tackling educational disadvantage, with a strong emphasis on teacher development [education-ni.gov.uk], [education-ni.gov.uk].

The reforms can be summarised as follows:

• • Curriculum reform:  The reforms aim to create a more ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum and improve literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking, drawing on practices from high-performing international education systems. 
• • Assessment and qualifications:  Minister Givan has begun reviewing how pupils are assessed and how qualifications are structured, with further reforms planned as part of the TransformED programme. 
• • Reducing educational disadvantage:  A key goal is to narrow the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers by improving teaching quality and targeting support where it is most needed. 
• • Financial and structural reform:  Alongside teaching reforms, Minister Givan has proposed changes to school transport, school meals, special educational needs support, and the school estate to help address significant budget pressures in the education system. 

In essence, Givan’s programme purports to make Northern Ireland’s education system more academically rigorous, improve teaching quality, and raise standards—while addressing inequality and financial sustainability. 

The “Revised” Northern Ireland Curriculum 

(or what the Givan Reforms aim to replace)

The Givan Reforms are set to reverse the Northern Ireland Revised Curriculum, which was developed following a major review that began in 1999, and was introduced in stages in the early 2000’s.  At the time, it represented a significant shift away from a content-heavy curriculum towards one focused on skills, capabilities and pupil development. 

The main features of this ‘revised’ curriculum placed greater emphasis on skills, rather than simply content.  The curriculum aimed to help pupils learn how to think, solve problems and apply knowledge, rather than mainly memorising facts.  Schools were encouraged to develop transferable skills that would be useful in further education, work, and everyday life. 

Three ‘cross-curricular’ skills—Communication, Using Mathematics, and Using ICT  [Information and Communications Technology]—became a responsibility within all subjects:  Thinking Skills and Personal Capabilities became a distinctive feature through the explicit teaching of the following subjects: 

Managing information:  Thinking, Problem-Solving and Decision-Making;  Being Creative;  Working with Others and Self-management.

The Curriculum specified only a minimum entitlement:  with schools given greater freedom to design learning experiences suited to their pupils and local circumstances.  The vision was for a broader concept of education and the curriculum sought to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, cultural, emotional, intellectual and physical development, alongside academic achievement.

The curriculum was to be implemented side-by-side with Assessment reform to reduce reliance on the previous system of detailed attainment targets and statutory testing, placing more emphasis on assessment that supports learning. 

In practice, this ‘progressive’ agenda was worthy, but was frustrated in implementation by a range of factors, not least the selective system in Northern Ireland, the primacy of university entrance as a key goal, with exams as the prime measurement of educational success.  At Key-stage 3 and 4, the primacy of exam results held, and the associated frenetic and toxic ‘grad-grind’ and “teaching to the test” practices to achieve examination success became standard.  Education Trade Unions, for instance, characterised this as “duking the stats”. 

The cross-curricular approach was frustrated by a ‘cack-handed’ bureaucratic approach and ran into the ground by way of sustained Teacher-Union industrial action, as did the aggressive “name and shame” style of school inspection, implemented to ape the English OFSTED system.

What Minister Givan’s reforms have in their sights is not the frenetic emphasis on exam results dominating the last five years of schooling, but the sensible vision of revised Northern Ireland Curriculum.  Responding to wider societal needs, the curriculum (in theory) sought to move from a knowledge-dominated, subject-centred model towards a skills-based, flexible, curriculum focused on personal development, thinking skills, employability and lifelong learning.

In short, these are the ‘battle-lines’ of an old education contest, which feature over the developed world.

The Criticisms

The Givan reforms are far from a ‘given’.  A large, multi-faceted reform programme has been driven at pace to an aggressive timetable.  Much of it is within the competency of the Minister and does not require a vote in the Assembly.  With Elections to the Assembly to take place in May 2027 (preceeded by a period of “Purdah”), Minister Givan’s main enemy is time.  Whether one agrees with the Minister’s aims or not , it has to be said that Givan has been politically impressive in marshalling (some might say ‘bull-dozing’) such far-reaching reform and driving the change with alacrity. 

To this point, the reform programme has not really engaged the society at large:  it is seen as (in Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s famous words) a teachers’ “secret garden” issue.  

However, business and employers are beginning to notice that the Givan Reforms may negatively affect the work-readiness of potential young employees.  The Confederation Of British Industry in Northern Ireland, for instance, is on record as raising concerns that schools were in danger of becoming “exam factories”. Concern is being raised about the interests of neuro-divergent children in what looks like a ‘straight-jacket’ and narrowed educational fare.  Voices are querying how the Givan approach will help the educationally disadvantaged. In particular, the overwhelmingly poor category of “NEETS” (those not in Education, Employment or Training) may stand to lose most by a narrow ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum menu.

Parent groups have noted that severe “wellbeing concerns have been raised in England after 10-12 years of the Gove Reforms, and that children themselves are less happy at school, more disengaged, and finding school uninteresting, boring or irrelevant.  Some Arts, music and drama interests have raised concerns, as have modern language teachers. Subject specialists in History, for example, have railed against an English-centric content provision.  And Irish language educators are bemused as to how core-content will be developed from substantially English-written content. 

Several Northern Ireland Assembly Education Committee hearings have shown a sharp division emerge on the reforms, with the spectrum of Unionists backing the changes and Republicans, Nationalists and the Alliance Party opposing. 

The main criticisms of the Givan reforms have been:

• • That the DUP reforms are broadly a “cut and paste” of the Gove Reforms in England, dominated by traditional education thinking and philosophically underpinned by E.D. Hirsch and his US-based Core Knowledge Foundation. In effect, it is ideologically-driven reform.

• The reforms are clearly contested politically, with both Unionist Parties in favour, but with trenchant criticism from Sinn Fein, SDLP and the Alliance Party.  Contested policy in areas like education rarely works in the long-term:  they are vulnerable to changes from any new Minister.

• That the cast of imported expertise drafted in (at no little expense at a time of public spending austerity) are all noted traditionalists, many being veterans of the Gove reforms in England, or from Flanders and New Zealand—all “core knowledge” devotees.  Warwick Mansell, in his comprehensive critique of the NI reforms in “Education Uncovered”, cites names such as Sir Nick Gibb (former Schools Minister in England), Christine Counsell (Chair of the Curriculum Taskforce), Baroness Amanda Spielman (ex-head of OFSTED, the English inspectorate), Tim Oates (lead curriculum reviewer for Gove in England), Daniel Mujis (a Belgian national of Queens University, previously head of research at OFSTED), Daisy Christodoulou, Michael Fordham, Heather Fearn – all stalwarts of the conservative/traditional school.  Colloquially, this tight-knit faction has become known as “Team Gove”. In short, the advisory ‘deck’ is packed.

• The 7-strong International Ministerial Advisory Panel includes a majority of English traditionalist nominees.  The Independent Review of Assessment Panel has 3 members, 2 of whom are English traditionalists. Consultation events have, similarly been ‘packed’ with “Core-Knowledge” advocates.

• A Core-Content Framework for initial teacher education (Teacher Training), led by Mujis and modelled on the identically-named policy launched in England in 2021, is causing concern for the main Teacher-Training Institutes locally, notably the St Mary’s and Stranmillis University Colleges. The ‘fast track’ teacher training mechanisms, designed to tackle teaching shortages in England may be foisted onto Northern Ireland—which has a high quality teaching workforce and relatively strong teachers ‘pipeline’.

• That the cited Reading Lists and research underpinning the reforms are biased towards the Core-Knowledge ‘traditionalist’ constituency.  Indeed, the research base cited for the reforms has been heavily criticised and countered by experts such as former Stranmillis University College researcher, Dr. Michael Levers, and renowned journalist and educational author, Warwick Mansell.

Analysis:  The Questions Minister Paul Givan Ignores

In concept, the Northern Ireland Curriculum has been, by international comparison, something to be proud of.  It is a modern curriculum, but it has suffered—and was undermined by—the way it has been implemented, and by other components of the education system. 

The Northern Ireland system is like a curate’s egg—‘good in parts’—but decidedly average overall and with some severely ingrained and damaging fractures.

The teaching workforce is of a very high quality.  In Primary Schools, the last TIMMS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) research benchmarked upper Primary School-level children as globally leading in reading—up with Finland and the Pacific Rim countries!  However, this has slipped somewhat in the latest iteration of TIMMS and PIRLS announced in September 2026. 

Primary Schools, it should be noted, are still high-performing, with nurturing environments, local and broadly socially-mixed (or comprehensive) in intake.  Many, notably rural, Primary Schools are small—which helps to nurture children.

In Secondary Schools, the PISA benchmarking places us around the average.    Of interest, in our sharply socially-segregated Secondary Schools, is that our ‘high-flyers’, the gifted and talented (or “best and brightest”)—do poorly by international comparison—even in our elitist or selective system.

Our ‘just above average’  PISA (the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment) placement is at odds with the separate PIACC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) research, which places Northern Ireland in the lowest quartile (19th of 24), with a large body of people (often characterised as a “long tail”) in the workforce with no qualifications at all:  effectively functionally illiterate.  This ‘long tail’ of under-achievement is a prevalent feature of socially-segregated, or ‘selective’ education systems across the world.

The curriculum in Northern Ireland is undermined in a number of ways. This article will finish by citing just two critical areas—social segregation, and ‘too early’ entry into formal learning.

Traditionally, concern have been raised about how communally-segregated our system is, with only 7-8% of pupils educated in de-segregated settings.  However, the bigger problem is that the UK systems (of which Northern Ireland is the worst affected) have the most socially-segregated education systems in the developed world.  The OECD’s 2012 benchmark placed the UK at 34th out of 34 developed countries on that measure.  Get that!  The UK has the most socially segregated education system in the developed world, bar none!  

Unsurprisingly, the measurement of social segregation has not featured in subsequent OECD research. The question is no longer asked!

Why Does Social Segregation Matter? 

Early division matters because all the research, from the famous US 1966 Coleman Report to today, tells us that systems in countries in which income differentials are narrow invariably do better.  For example, relatively egalitarian countries in Scandinavia perform well (though this is fraying in recent times!).  But so does Estonia, a poor but relatively egalitarian society. 

At an individual level, a child from a low-income household in a socially disadvantaged area does much better in school with a socially mixed intake.  The peer effect is vital.  The same child attending a high-poverty school does much worse, always.

That tells us that socially mixed intakes are miles better—as a policy response—than any amount of targeting-social-need, or of compensatory financing.  All the UK systems of education (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) favour compensatory funding (which is the wrong response) over arranging for socially-mixed intakes! 

The fact is socially-mixed schools cost nothing—other than the political will to argue the case with predominantly middle-class parents, who have bought into the notion of education as a competitive life ‘good’.

The single biggest challenge for Northern Ireland’s schooling system is social de-segregation—and there is near-complete academic research consensus on this.  What we lack is political will, and traction to act on the research.  The Givan Reforms do not address this at all.

Also, Northern Ireland’s children start formal education too early, at 4 years and 2 months, the earliest in Europe.  And our Early Years (0-4) sector is badly underfunded by international comparison.  The fact is that the ‘backwash’ effect of starting school at 4 is that children are pressed too early to meet bench-marked standards at Key Stage 1. 

In Northern Ireland, there are children in reading-recovery programmes before children in other systems have even started school, or before formal literacy or reading!  In short, the youngest children are not given time to ‘bed in’ before facing a menu of formalised or regimented target-driven education. 

It is entirely unsurprising that Minister Givan’s reform package avoids these issues like the plague, and in doing so, gives a lie to the notion that TransformED will, in any serious way, tackle educational disadvantage.

Who Dares Wins!

Finally, the Givan Reforms are currently in the formal consultation stage.  It should be remarked that Policy ‘consultation’ is a highly managed process (described well by journalist and author Sam McBride in his book, ‘Burned’, on how the “Cash for Ash” scandal—aka the Renewable Heat Initiative, emerged from a managed, consultant-assisted process).  The timeline is aggressive, as the mandate of the current Assembly and Executive Ministers runs down towards the 2027 Elections. 

There is opposition to the proposals, but this is scattered and uncoordinated.  The main viable opposition could be the Teachers’ Unions (teachers are highly unionised in Northern Ireland), but the Unions are rarely purposeful on matters of education policy, always more focused on pay, terms and conditions.  By contrast, Givan’s “Team Gove” are tight-knit and purposeful, secure in the ideology of E.D Hirsch and the Core-Knowledge Foundation.  

Who dares wins!

Mark Langhammer