King’s Birthday Honours: Roisin Marshall - Northern Ireland needs to be “shared, not shared out” says Integrated education campaigner

A leading campaigner for integrated education has said Northern Ireland needs to be “shared, not shared out” as she became an OBE.

Roisin Marshall is the chief executive officer of the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education (NICIE) and has been honoured with an OBE for services to education and to community reconciliation in Northern Ireland, in the King’s birthday honours list.

The NICIE was founded in 1987 to coordinate efforts to develop integrated education and support parent groups through the process of opening new schools.

Ms Marshall described her shock at becoming an OBE: “I was really shocked, very honoured and very surprised that I had been nominated, so very grateful to whoever did that. I think my whole professional career has stemmed from my experiences as a child, if that makes sense.

“So I have a sister with Down Syndrome and autism and from a very young age, I went along with her to a local junior gateway club, where I was very privileged to meet children from both backgrounds, Protestant and Catholic backgrounds, and growing up as a Catholic that wasn’t something that I was exposed to a lot.”

Ms Marshall worked in special needs teaching as well as in the community sector, and said her work is about promoting reconciliation through education.

“I feel very privileged to have had the experiences that I had, and the rest of my professional career has been about trying to give something back or trying to share my experiences of all of that and recreating that for the children and young people,” she explained.

“And this role as the chief executive of the council for Integrated Education, I’ve been enabled to almost pull all of those experiences together and provide leadership to the organisation which is ultimately about enabling and, I suppose, promoting peace and reconciliation through integrated education.”

Ms Marshall also said that her organisation would like to see integration happen, not just on the basis of religion, but also on integrating children with a range of educational needs.

She continued: “My vision is that we would have children and young people going in the one gate for example, but having within that ways for the different children, but essentially, that they can play together and get to know each other and learn together in different scenarios, rather than being educated in isolated schools.

“So it is about encouraging collaboration between schools and encouraging schools to see that they are not just responsible for the children in their own school but responsible for all the children in the area.”

Ms Marshall stated that the trend of underinvestment in education in Northern Ireland needs to be reversed: “I think that’s the vision, it will require in order to transform our education system, a significant investment in education in Northern Ireland, and as we know, the last 10 years, there has been a significant underinvestment in education.

“So we’ve got to think strategically about what we want and coming out of a post conflict situation we have begun to make peace, we’ve obviously made peace over the last 25 years, but the next 25 years we’ve got to spend actually building peace.

“And that will require right from our very youngest children and right up to, not just education but thinking about shared housing, and thinking about how all of these things need to work together in order that our children and young people grow up safe and happy and actually feel that this is a place that can be shared, not shared out.”