NS Hosts: Pivotal's Ben Harper on educational migration

In this episode of the Northern Slant Hosts podcast, I spoke with Dr Ben Harper, Research Manager at Pivotal, about the research that they have been carrying out on educational migration in Northern Ireland, entitled ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’. We discussed how many people leave, and at what rate they return, as well as the reasons for them leaving, the reasons for them staying away, and what the Northern Ireland Executive, and society, can do to bring them back.

I’d actually taken part in the research interviews, so it was fascinating to see how my perspective compared to the perspectives of others.

You can watch our conversation here (and on YouTube), or listen on Spotify if you’re on the go. You can also scroll down for some highlights from our Q&A.

This topic was something that I’d discussed with Ann Watt in a previous episode, and so I opened by asking Ben about the background to the research.

This specific project came about because we had done an initial desktop review, where we reviewed evidence from previous research, obviously a lot of policy research, and spoke to case stakeholders. And what was really clear to us was that this area hadn’t been really thoroughly addressed in nearly a decade, which is a really long time.

And within that time, university participation generally in the United Kingdom has increased and certainly in Northern Ireland has increased. At the same time, I would argue that educational migration has become the norm in Northern Ireland. We wanted to really understand that and part of understanding that for us, it’s about user-based research. It’s not about us just casting opinions about. It’s, about generating evidence from people who are living that experience.

Yeah, indeed. I was one of those people who interviewed, and it’s great to be able to ask you to come and speak about it. What were the main findings from the report?

I guess in terms of finding in my mind, I’m separating them from the student sample – so they were people who left Northern Ireland who are currently studying outside of Northern Ireland – and the group we targeted there were people who are studying in Great Britain.

The biggest thing that jumped out to me when I think about our student group is 73% of those students applied for university outside of Northern Ireland as their UCAS firm choice. And I suppose Roger that tells me that our sample were a bunch of young people who had in mind that they wanted to leave.

But the three main findings really to unpick the reason why people ask where community relations, graduate opportunities and social and student experience.

And then what about the people who work abroad? What was the main findings there? Did they fall down the same lines?

There were three top reasons for leaving and not returning. The first reason again surprised me. It was sectarianism. This is really pervasive across home and work life. So participants told us concerns about education, for example: if they had children, where they’d be educated. They had concerns about where they would live. And there was this general view that while some things had changed at a big picture level, very little had changed.

We had many quotes from adults living outside Northern Ireland when they return for Christmas or marriages and there was an uneasiness that they sensed in Northern Ireland that some participants described that has never went away.

Another reason that diaspora talked about was job opportunities, and this perception, I guess, that Northern Ireland is not connected to a global market, and that working practices are outdated. People talked in some depth about some things like working from home, flexi-time, opportunities that they felt weren’t available in big employers in Northern Ireland.

I should say that these are perceptions, of course. This is not us saying that this does not exist in Northern Ireland. But you can see this general sense of Northern Ireland feeling, for some people, somewhat “outdated”.

And finally, a really important point, is that nearly every participants, if not all participants, had very limited faith in government functioning; had limited faith in Government’s ability to change and look to the future, and move beyond identity politics. It was a huge issue for participants in the sample.

That’s something that, again, runs right through the report – that lack of faith in Government. Did you find that was something that flowed through from the desk research that you’d done previously on this, and then into these interviews, that reinforced this?

That’s a really good question actually, Roger, and to be honest it’s something I’ve never really articulated, and it’s a really important point. In the evidence we see on paper, there is a lot of discussion about sectarianism and community relations. Some of the big authors like Trew at Ulster University have done really good work, and that’s all around identity and community relations. But I believe there is less discussion about population view on Government functioning, and as you say, there is a consistent thread across our samples that people are really disillusioned at one end, and at the other end quite angry. And I hear what you’re saying, and many people say that no Government is perfect. People I spoke to in America and Australia noted that all Governments have issues. Of course they do. What I think makes Northern Ireland quite unique is our focus on identity at times.

I remember a participant really well, and she described an issue in Scotland at the time of the Scottish referendum. It was along the lines of her saying that while Scottish independence was important, people weren’t out on the streets, arguing with each other and fighting with each other. And I am – of course – not distilling our Northern Ireland conflict down to that point; but it made me think that identity in Northern Ireland is such a difficult issue to talk about. That’s another message from our research: we need earlier work on how we get young people to think and talk about that, because our study does demonstrate that community relations and sectarianism are huge push factors in Northern Ireland for both groups. And I would like to think about that further when we, when we look at the Government’s conceptualization of a “determined believer”.

Yeah. And the very first Northern Slant Hosts – actually, probably before it was even called Northern Slant Hosts – I spoke to Peter Cardwell, former SpAd, and he said that one of the arguments that unionism should be making, is that we should be promoting Northern Ireland to the rest of the UK as a place to live and work, and just bring 100,000 people in. Is there an argument for this?

I think there’s a couple of points there. It is about making Northern Ireland a place to come and live for people in United Kingdom, and globally. We’ve got excellent resources, great communities, brilliant education. But I think what our report is saying, and what jumps out at me the most is even if we get more people here, we still need to address these underlying issues that are creating significant divisions in society.

And there’s, I guess, the temptation in Northern Ireland to avoid talking about some of the difficult aspects of the past. Certainly, our sample would have said that they had limited

exposure to people of difference. I feel like I urgently needs addressed. In terms of solutions,

I think it’s important that as a think tank, we don’t say “this is what you should do”, because that would feel really arrogant and ill-judged.

I think this is about the first steps towards using evidence to shape policy. We feel that the Executive urgently needs to develop a strategy, and that maybe as simple as saying “we’re not going to do anything about educational migration” and it may be they say, “well, actually, you know that this isn’t the priority”. We would feel, of course it is, and it’s linked to this wider need for a review of higher education funding.

Your third recommendation is that the Executive needs to demonstrate that the government is working to move Northern Ireland forward. And you talk about breaking those barriers to people returning, it feels like that’s a challenging one, and we’ve sort of lost the battle, and if you’re trying to break those barriers, there’s limited options to doing this, isn’t there?

I think it’s something that doesn’t happen overnight. It’s about step-changes, and one of the big things that we would like to see is much more implementation, and evaluation of strategies. In Northern Ireland were really good at sort of launched in ships and policies and strategies. So there’s been recent discussions and recent skills consultations, and perhaps we would attract and maintain more people if some of those were actually implemented successfully and fully and evaluated.

Similarly within education, within primary and secondary education, there’s been numerous reviews, which is brilliant. But what we would want to see is those actually being implemented and evaluated, because it’s this big systemic issue, isn’t it? It’s not just about saying, “come to Northern Ireland and we will offer your tax break.” That won’t keep people here for a long time. We need to think about this in a really big-picture way, which I appreciate can feel a bit overwhelming and a bit sort of ‘kick it down the road’. But there are small steps, so on we’ve tried to outline some of those within the report, and within this discussion.

This interview is available as a podcast on Spotify.

NS Hosts: Pivotal’s Ben Harper on educational migration

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Thank you