Ulster Unionist Party education spokesperson Danny Kinahan has commented on the lack of political agreement on post primary school transfer, on the eve of the first of this year’s unofficial tests.

 Danny Kinahan MLA said:

 “No one should be happy  with the current situation where we have thousands of 10 and 11 year olds facing an intensive 4 week period of Saturday morning transfer tests, with all the stress which that entails. The old 11+ transfer test was less than ideal, but it was the height of irresponsibility to do away with it without having an agreed system to replace it.

 “Ironically, for all their occasional socialist pretensions, Sinn Fein has only succeeded in privatising the transfer test system. 

 “This situation should never have been allowed to happen. In the early 2000s at the time of the Burns and Gallagher Reports, there was an attempt to develop a consensus about the way to transfer primary school pupils.  This was abandoned when Martin McGuinness unilaterally announced an end to the 11+test.  We have been in a period of stasis ever since.

 “The emergence of non-departmental transfer tests was an inevitable reaction by the Grammar schools responding to parental demand.

 “The argument that there should be no academic selection of any kind flies in the face of reality, and the associated argument, that all post primary schools teach the same curriculum anyway, begs an obvious question- why?  Children are not all the same, they have different aptitudes and the curriculum should be flexible enough to allow for some schools to concentrate on the more technical and vocational topics, rather than ‘academic’ subjects.

 “This is a political problem which demands a political solution.  Some politicians need to get off their ideological hobby horses and work out a sensible way forward with the rest of us.”