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This article is based on a research project carried out at the Graduate School of Education, Queen's University Belfast. The researchers conducted a study of discussion-based citizenship education for post-16 students in Northern Ireland (UK) over a period of 18 months. One of the researchers designed and delivered a course of citizenship education for students in a case study school (100 of whom were involved). This course was constructed within a theoretical framework that drew heavily upon the work of Jurgen Haherinas. The results of the study showed that an overwhelming majority of the students involved gave comprehensive and positive evaluations of a citizenship course that was reliant upon a discussion-based form of education. This article argues that such courses, premised on the need to encourage communicative competence amongst young people, should he offered to all students within the non-compulsory education sector in the UK and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article underlines the close connection between cultural/political identity and education in Northern Ireland. There is a complex and fundamentally important relationship between politics and education in Northern Ireland. The political and educational history of Northern Ireland provides an important starting point for any debate about the reconstruction of modern Northern Irish society. The state of Northern Ireland, conceived in 1920 in the Government of Ireland Act, was born in a crisis. The Ulster Unionists, whose long-held political stance had been centred on the repudiation of Home Rule as a concept, now found that they were being asked to manage their own parliament.

This study is concerned with estimates of secondary school effect size in Northern Ireland. Utilising data from a random sample of the region's schools, four indices of pupil achievement variation in public examinations are employed. These outcome measures are (i) overall examination achievement - a composite weighted measure - together with achievement in General Certificate of Education examinations in (ii) English, (iii) Mathematics and (iv) Chemistry. Examinations of this type are taken, typically, by pupils aged 16 years (the statutory leaving age), at the end of their fifth year of secondary education. Using a two-level hierarchical linear regression model, the paper considers variation in school effect size by outcome criterion. Variation is measured in standard deviation units and in terms of the proportion of achievement variance "explained" by schools after adjustment for pupil-intake differences. Comparisons are made with recent findings for Scotland and for England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]