There’s saying that every day’s a school day, in that we are constantly learning in life. Then again, it’s also said there’s nothing new under the sun.

We can believe both. Taking past experiences and using them to create a better future seems to be very sensible.

In that spirit, let’s consider four disparate and different people. Archdeacon Isaac Pratt was Rector of Rossorry in the early part of the 20th century, in fact from 1906 to 1957.

The rugby player Andrew Trimble represented Ulster and Ireland, while Armagh’s Oisin McConville was a GAA player of distinction. And then there’s a teenager, Assanato Embalo, born in the West African country of Guinea-Bissau who came to Northern Ireland at the age of six and is a star pupil at a school in Dungannon.

Between them, their lives are separated by well over 100 years, but we can learn something from their experiences which illustrate the importance of inclusivity in educating our children.

Andrew Trimble, now a parent and in his mid-30s, has recently challenged why religion and education here are aligned and said: “Let’s just educate our kids and then they can do religious stuff at the weekends or outside of school hours.”

His statement has all the more impact considering that he is a Christian who has often spoken about his faith meaning far more to him than his stellar rugby career, which includes being part of the only Ireland team to beat the New Zealand all-blacks.

The unease over the alignment of education and religion is nothing new in Ireland.

Even further back than Archdeacon Pratt, it was addressed in an article in the Impartial Reporter in 1859, which went as far as to suggest that the “mixing of secular and religious instruction….in a country like Ireland is evil".

The article 164 years also says: “The government, as we have all along contended, ought not to have anything to do with religion instruction” and it calls for “the government to give secular instruction only; leaving it with the parents and clergy to give religious instruction.”

I’m indebted to Marion Maxwell for this gem, and also for sharing another piece of information from her research into the Jones family of Lisgoole Abbey about the opening of Jones Memorial in the early 1900s, when a new school structure was to be called Jones Memorial Bible School.

But Archdeacon Pratt personally chipped off the word “bible” fearing the title denoted a too narrow evangelical perspective and the broader community, including Roman Catholics, wouldn’t feel welcome.

An early pioneer of integrated education perhaps; and, of course, much later in the century, Marion’s husband John Maxwell was something of a trailblazer in that regard being one of the prime movers in establishing integrated education in Enniskillen.

By then, of course, the vast majority of our children were going to school with others of their own religion, the link between education and religion had been well established following the Partition of Ireland in 1921.

Even though the main churches remained all-Ireland bodies, the State schools either side of the new Border were organised very differently. And both the Catholic and Protestant hierarchy were highly involved and influential in their side of segregated education.

The Education Minister, Lord Londonderry initially set up an Education Committee, but in the context of early sectarian violence, the Catholic Church refused to recognise the new education system and didn’t nominate members to the committee, which then became de facto an all-Protestant committee.

In his book on Partition, Johnston McMaster records that one of education committee members, Church of Ireland Bishop Grierson of Down said that religion should be taught in schools and that “merely secular education does a cruel wrong to a child".

McMaster, though, writes that: “It was not just about the Bible in education, it was about how teachers were appointed and how schools were managed. Schools were to be transferred to the State, but Protestant Churches still wanted control in relation to management and teacher appointments.”

Conversely, of course, the Catholic church which had opted out had control of its own system.

Although this system was set up 100 years ago in very different times, and even though the churches have less and less formal control in an increasingly secular society, education remains largely segregated and we are living with an impact on children and society which seems anachronistic.

Often we hear some Christians decry calls for the secularisation of education as “taking God out of schools”.

But aside from the previous few paragraphs showing that the church involvement in education was about much more than religious instruction, there is no reason why arrangements cannot be made to facilitate families of people of faith who want to avail of it.

For example, St. Patrick’s School in Dungannon has a separate prayer room for pupils of an Islamic background and other schools allow Scripture knowledge classes.

This isn’t about denying people’s faith, this is about schools being a place of educational learning in a modern world. The church and Christian parents have their role in religious

education. There are multiple reasons to have a single education system, with our children growing up knowing each other in a respectful environment.

In society today and in schools, there appears to be more rapprochment than ever, with shared education programmes, joint sports schemes and links between schools. And parents often choose to send their child to a school which is not traditionally the choice of their co-religionists.

But the fact remains, only seven per cent of our pupils attend integrated schools.

This was addressed by Andrew Trimble and Oisin McConville on BBC’s 'The View' recently.

Trimble said he cannot understand why the vast majority of children in Northern Ireland go to separate schools where they rarely spend time with pupils from other religious or cultural backgrounds.

"We talk a lot about diversity in the workplace and collaborative thinking and challenging each other and how healthy that is, and if that is so healthy why do we not have it with our kids?," he asked.

All-Ireland winner McConville also backed more integration, saying: "We can give people options - when we start giving people options as far as integrated education is concerned it becomes the norm," he said.

"But there has to be that drive and that push from governmental level.”,

So, the move towards integrated education is surely inevitable.

But, as ever, we tend to look at things in a binary way, as if it was yesterday’s context of a straight split between Protestant and Catholic. Whereas we are now a multi-cultural society of multi-faiths and none.

And new communities can teach us a lot about inclusivity and the value of diversity.

The teenager I referred to earlier, Assanato Embalo was featured in a BBC video which revealed that there are 17,400 “newcomer pupils” in Northern Ireland schools; that is pupils born outside the UK.

Remarkably, at St. Patrick’s, Dungannon, of the school’s 690 pupils 51 per cent were “newcomers".

This is a reflection of the influx of workers into Dungannon, and the principal, Catherine McHugh said they had kids who were East Timorese, Portuguese, Polish, Lithuanian and African communities.

Assanato was filmed enjoying gaelic football and saying she found the inclusivity at the school “absolutely amazing". Which clearly inspired her, as she said: “You can never limit yourself. You just don’t know how far you can go.”

“The school is not just for one particular country or some particular cultures,” she said.

This isn’t 1921. It’s time our school system was brought up to date.