Below is the text of TUV leader Jim Allister’s speech in the Assembly yesterday:
“When we, as MLAs, are discussing the future or the proposed closure of schools, we are often faced with the difficulties that the school in question has. Perhaps it is underperforming or undersubscribed, and we have all those mountains to climb. However, this case is surely quite exceptional in that we have a proposal to, effectively, close one of the most popular, effective and successful schools in County Fermanagh, namely Collegiate Grammar School. The school is oversubscribed. Indeed, it has the physical capacity to take another 150 pupils, but, by ministerial directive, it is capped at 500 and denied that opportunity. Hence, it is highly oversubscribed. Its output is a school of great achievement and success. It has produced, and is still producing, wonderful results.
“I should perhaps confess to a certain degree of bias: my wife is a former pupil of Collegiate Grammar School, and much the better for that. It is a school that anyone would be very proud to have in their constituency and which any MLA worth their salt would fight to keep. To find a proposal that suggests that that school, with all its remarkable history, the unique niche it fills in the education market and its success, should be picked on to be liquidated and merged is quite reckless and perverse. Therefore, I totally oppose that and support the motion.
“Let us be very clear: the net outcome of what the board wishes to do will radically decrease the number of grammar school places in County Fermanagh. That probably is the prime motivation of the Minister and board, because, of course, theirs is a dogma of anti-selection.
“There is something here very much worth preserving. I hear talk about Devenish. Devenish is the one reason why you should not close the Collegiate. Devenish speaks of broken promises. How many schools were closed, including Lisnaskea recently, on the very promise and premise that there would be Devenish? So, no one should be saying, “Oh, we are jeopardising Devenish if we don’t close the Collegiate”. Devenish has become synonymous with a failure to deliver, and the Devenish promise has become synonymous with a broken promise on education in County Fermanagh.
“It is a very simple matter: as far as grammar school education in Fermanagh is concerned, there are two operating successful schools. Let that which is not broken continue. The Collegiate in particular has been excellent and has excelled in all that it has done. If this House cares anything for education, it will seek to preserve that.”