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Teachers urge minister to 'act on fact' and end selection at 11

Teachers are urging the north to look beyond its own borders and accept that the 11-plus has been "consigned to the rubbish heap of the past".

The north's biggest locally-based teaching union - the UTU - is asking education minister to "act on fact".

The union was responding to John O'Dowd's bid to internationalise the education debate with his recent overseas trip to the Us.

Mr O'Dowd visited numerous schools in New York city on a fact-finding trip to north America. He visited Salome Urena de Henriquez campus, a full service community school in Washington heights, which caters for more than 1,000 pupils who live in areas of high social disadvantage.

The school encourages community participation to promote educational achievement.

The UTU said it was crucial that in this global economy, the north "look beyond our own borders" and learn from the best practice of what is happening elsewhere in the world.

General secretary Avril Hall Callaghan said any sharing of learning was a good thing, allowing Northern Ireland to prevent mistakes made elsewhere and adopt strategies which work.

What the minister will hear time and again in discourse with overseas opposite numbers, she said, was the discrediting of academic selection at 11.

Grammar schools are planning to run their own entrance exams for the fifth successive year, in defiance of consecutive education ministers, teaching unions and the catholic church. Record numbers of children last year took the unofficial tests.

"This outmoded system has been consigned to the rubbish heap of the past in many of the world's leading economies yet it is still being flogged to children here in Northern Ireland, despite the fact that increasingly it is being proven as an anachronism," Ms Hall Callaghan said.

She added that if the minister was going to travel and share expertise and learning with international counterparts then he must be prepared to take on board strategies that will not always sit easily with some in Northern Ireland.

"What we see elsewhere are systems allowing children at 14 to discern their own paths, at a time in their academic lives when they themselves see where their strengths lie," she said.

"These systems often allow the children from this age to specialise to an even greater degree than in the UK - and the proof of the system's success has to be in the strident economies of those countries."