Who are we?

Rowandale Integrated Primary Education steering group consists of parents and individuals from Moira and Hillsborough, working closely with the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education (NICIE) and funded by the Integrated Education Fund (IEF) to secure integrated primary education for our children.

What have we achieved?

With the support of families and the local community we have secured conditional approval to open Rowandale Integrated Primary School this September (2007). This is so that our children can be educated together in a school which fully embraces the differences in our society, learning in an environment of respect for other faiths, cultures and abilities.

Integrated education:

  • is essentially Christian in character and involves children from Catholic, Protestant, other faiths and none, within an environment where their beliefs and traditions are all equally valued.
  • also means equal opportunities regardless of gender, physical or academic ability.
  • encourages parental involvement as a central value, with a high level of parents on the board of governors. The Board of Governors would have up to six places for parents, the largest number of places in any school sector. Parents are encouraged to participate fully in all aspects of school life.
  • aims to cultivate the individual’s self respect and respect for other people and cultures, teaching them to appreciate and understand difference. Combined with a child-centred approach; children develop confidence and their self-esteem is improved.

    The Department of Education accepts a balance of 70:30 (with 30% coming from whichever is the smaller religious group in the area) as the minimum required for a new school to be recognised as integrated.

    • In the longer term, the NICIE 'Statement of Principles' requires that all integrated schools seek to achieve a 40:40 balance in pupil admissions between Catholics and Protestants.

    See the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section for answers to questions such as:

  • What is the difference between an 'integrated' and a 'mixed' school?
  • How is religion taught in an integrated school?

Why are we doing this?

We believe that parents should have the right to choose to have their children educated together in an integrated environment.

We believe that local integrated primary education provision is the best step towards improving all our children's tomorrows.

There are economic benefits to having Integrated schools rather than separate education provision for the main faiths in Northern Ireland. One political party estimates the cost of underpinning our segregated society at £1bn each year. This includes security costs and the price of the vast duplication of services required to spare the two communities from having to share the likes of schools, health facilities, swimming pools and bus stops.

We were delighted with the announcement made by the Minister for Education on 20 December 2006 that Rowandale Integrated Primary School has been granted conditional approval to open in September 2007.

The history of the campaign

We wrote to 33 local schools in 2004, asking if they would be interested in transformation to integrated status. We received no positive responses, and so began our campaign for the provision of a new integrated primary school.

We have many families registered on our expression of interest database. We submitted a development proposal to the Department of Education in the autumn of 2005. As you may be aware, we were all very disappointed when the then Minister of Education, Angela Smith, turned down our proposal in March the following year.

We remained committed to securing this choice for the parents of this area, as we are convinced that integrated education has a very important role to play in our shared future within Northern Ireland. We would have been happy for this to have been achieved through transformation of an existing primary school or through the establishment of a new school. As such, we encouraged all the schools within our identified catchment area to consider transformation, however to no avail.

Our Development Proposal for a 'new' school was therefore submitted to the Department of Education in September 2006, and was granted conditional approval on 20 December 2006.

How you can support this campaign

To help us keep interested persons appraised of the school's development, we ask that interested persons to register with us through completing an Expression of Interest form. Families should complete a separate one for each child:

Download the Expression of Interest form.

Parents are encouraged to raise awareness of this campaign with other parents.

These are small steps that you can take. You may wish to offer practical support as the school develops or at our events.

If you require further information, you can find out more in a number of ways:

  1. Read through the other material on the site and visit it regularly to keep up to date as new information is added
  2. Come and see us at our next event. Information about this will be posted on the web site in the Events section and those of you who are on our database will be have the details sent out.
  3. Telephone our Development Officer at NICIE (Paula McIlwaine) on 028 90 236 200
  4. Email us.