Here's a paradox. Yesterday (Saturday) possibly the last ever 11-plus results were delivered to homes across Northern Ireland. Politicians have come up with nothing to other than unregulated anarchy to replace it and there is every likelihood of complicated legal actions against individual schools. Yet Sinn Féin and the DUP are both claim a policy victory in education.
After an eight year standoff, Sinn Féin can claim to have abolished the existing 11-plus, while the DUP boasts that it retained selection by blocking the efforts of Catriona Ruane, the education minister, to replace it.
The result is a free for all in which schools are choosing between at least four different entrance procedures, three of them involving privatised 11-plus-type tests administered by the schools themselves. Such an uneven system may well result in legal challenges from parents who feel that their children have been unfairly treated.
Whatever its faults, the 11 plus system at least applied a consistent standard across the board, but even it faced an average of 1,300 challenges from disappointed pupils each year.
It is a dispiriting mess, and the fact that both Sinn Féin and the DUP seem to feel some pride in their contribution to the outcome places a question mark over the capacity of the devolved administration to take decisions.
We were told that local politicians would bring power closer to the people and would be more responsive and accessible. A system of checks and balances, and the inclusion of every party in the government, would mean that one community could not trample the aspirations or interests of the other. That was the theory.
What we have got in practice is an incredibly lavish system of government which has shown itself unfit for purpose when it comes to making decisions. We have 108 MLAs and 14 ministers to govern 1.7 million people, proportionately two to four times more than other legislative assemblies on these islands, armed with so many vetoes and so little good will that "compromise" has become a dirty word.
If some celestial exam board was allocating a grade to Stormont politicians for their handling of education, it would be a D. The fact is that our schools and their pupils would probably have been better off without any local administration at all. Politicians and Ministers have collectively done more harm than good to a system which was working reasonably well, if not perfectly, without their interference.
The pro-selection lobby makes a number of powerful points in defence of the status quo. Northern Ireland comes consistently near the top of UK league tables in terms of the proportion of pupils who obtain 5 GCSEs at grades A* to C.
What's more, nearly all of Northern Ireland's schools manage this without charging high fees which would debar poorer pupils from attending them. There is only one equivalent of an English public school in the province. The rest of the top institutions are state funded and charge, at most, modest capitation fees to cover extra facilities.
This shows through in the fact that that local pupils who receive free school meals (because of low family income) do proportionately better at GCSE than their counterparts in Britain. Northern Ireland's universities also have a higher proportion of students from lower income families than the UK as a whole.
Of course these statistics hide considerable inequality. Even if they have a better chance than in Britain, children taking free school meals are badly under-represented in grammar schools and are far less likely to make it to university than their middle class counterparts. Pupils may do badly in the 11 plus because of some upset or nervousness on the day, and feel they are branded as failures for life.
In some urban working class areas, like Belfast's Shankill and New Lodge Roads, hardly any pupils pass the 11 plus and educational expectations are low. This must raise questions about the quality of teaching in primary schools as well as wider social issues such as access to reading matter in the home and to private study areas.
There is clearly a need for a system that will be more flexible and which will encourage every pupil to reach full potential regardless of background, but the present dispensation is not so bad that any half baked alternative would be an improvement.
Ruane talks of a system which fails our children and lashes out at elitism. She has a point, but is it churlish to point out that Ruane, who lives in Co Louth, sent her own daughter across the border to a grammar school with selective entry in preference to the Republic's system or a comprehensive? In fact, the success of Northern Ireland's education system is not all down to the 11 plus. Even the Association for Quality Education (AQE), the main pro-selection pressure group, admits that a good school can carry a "long tail" of pupils who received lower grades in the 11 plus without a falloff in standards.
They have to make this concession because, with falling school numbers, grammars are accepting lower 11 plus grades to fill up spare capacity. Currently 25% of pupils get an A, the top grade; 10% get a B; 10% get a C; and 55%, the majority, get a D. Of the 31 grammar schools in the AQE, only 7 confine their intake to the top two grades. The rest take Cs and many top up with Ds.
Many top schools have, through circumstance, become more like comprehensives. Anyway, traditional grammars are not the only good schools in the province. Not all parents are like Ruane. Some choose to send pupils who achieve higher grades to secondary schools or the religiously integrated sector. Able pupils still achieve good results because of the high quality of teaching.
The greatest underlying strength of the Northern Ireland education system is the standard of teachers across the board, not academic selection.
Elsewhere in the UK, teaching jobs are generally hard to fill with suitable candidates, but in the Province, there is intense competition for every post. Entry standards are high and the ablest students are attracted to the profession. The province's teacher training colleges are amongst the most selective in the UK.
Teaching is a high status profession. It is more respected than of politics, which is often regarded as a dirty game. There are very able politicians but, unlike Northern Ireland's schools, the power sharing machinery at Stormont provides jobs for people of more mixed ability.
Falling pupil numbers and a glut of teachers may be the real secret of the success of Northern Ireland's schools; it certainly contributes to their high standards. Thankfully, these are factors which are beyond the reach of squabbling politicians.
Education is a challenge the political system has, so far, failed. It is a bad omen for the future because school transfer is a bread and butter issue which shouldn't have engaged tribal loyalties in the way that it did.
This is not the first time a decision has been flunked – nothing productive has so far been done with the Maze site – but it is one of the most disappointing failures of the political system. If the executive can't agree on something like this, what happens when there are really hard and painful choices?
Next month a committee set up by the Catholic education sector will produce a suggested alternative to the present transfer procedure. This will be an opportunity to step back from the brink. Politicians of all hues should seize on it as a basis for discussions, alongside their own ideas including Ruane's proposals. They have been published as guidelines and basically advocate a postcode lottery with some tweaking to help disadvantaged children.
An educational crisis isn't inevitable. All that pupils, parents and teachers need from the politicians is a coherent framework in which to operate next year.
