School Estate: East Antrim

Part of Adjournment – in the Northern Ireland Assembly at 4:00 pm on 25 May 2021.

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Photo of Gordon Lyons Gordon Lyons DUP 4:00, 25 May 2021

First, I thank the Business Committee for scheduling the debate. At the outset, I apologise on behalf of my party and constituency colleague Mr David Hilditch, who is unable to be here. As most in the Chamber will know, he is getting chemotherapy treatment today. Of course, we wish him well with that and with the rest of his treatment.

I pay tribute to staff in schools right across East Antrim for all the work that they have done in what has been a very difficult year. I thank teachers, who have been put under huge pressure over the past number of months. We recognise that teaching from home and having to balance many different priorities at once has not been easy. I thank the senior management teams in schools, who have come under an awful lot of pressure and had to deal with an awful lot of uncertainty and a very fluid situation when schools were open and then closed, and all the additional pressures that came with that. I also thank other staff in schools, who have, perhaps, had additional responsibilities and work that they had to be involved in. They have done that work well. It is important to place on record our thanks to those who have done so much to try to ensure that children's education has continued, albeit in difficult situations and less than ideal scenarios.

As we get back to normal, the old problems persist. Many pupils in East Antrim are being educated in less than ideal facilities and poor accommodation. I want to raise a few issues with the House and the Minister. The first relates to the rationalisation of the school estate. Along with Mr Hilditch and other colleagues, who are here, we have all, in some way, been involved with Islandmagee Primary School and the long saga of getting it a new build. It has been over 10 years since I was first involved in meetings about Islandmagee Primary School. The school came about as the result of the merger of two schools: Kilcoan Primary School and Mullaghdubh Primary School. The new school building had been talked about for a long time. The new school has been operating on split sites since 2016. Here we are, five years later, and it is still on split sites.