Letter: FETO repeal promised fairness — yet teacher segregation still holds firm
A letter from Matthew Milliken:
The removal of the Fair Employment and Treatment Order (FETO) exemption in 2022 was heralded as a turning point for teacher recruitment in Northern Ireland.
For decades, schools could legally discriminate on religious grounds, reinforcing segregation in the teaching workforce and in schools generally. Yet the first monitoring data released since repeal shows how little has changed.
The recently released Transforming Education Paper (23) ‘All Change?’ has discovered that the completion of fair employment monitoring by teachers has been worryingly low — just 11% of teachers in controlled schools and under 3% in maintained schools responded to the statutory request — making the findings indicative and unreliable rather than conclusive.
Still, the picture that emerges is familiar: staff rooms in maintained schools remain well over 90% Catholic, while, although the controlled sector shows more non-aligned teachers, Catholic representation in state schools is minimal.
The authorities have struggled to gather and release accurate data, with weak reporting and reliance on residuary monitoring undermining transparency.
Meanwhile, entrenched practices such as traditional employment pathways and the requirement for Catholic RE certification continue to restrict genuine cross-sector mobility.
If the repeal of FETO is to mean more than just a symbolic gesture, barriers must be tackled head-on. Cultural norms that keep teachers “within their own sector” must be challenged, and the authorities must commit to rigorous monitoring.
Only then can we begin to build a genuinely diverse teaching workforce — something that would not only benefit staff, but also learners and ultimately wider society.
Matthew Milliken, Co-Author of Transforming Education Paper 23: ‘All change? The Impact of Fair Employment Legislation on Sectoral Patterns of Teacher Deployment’