Ms Catherine Quirke:

It is just such a small snippet of our day. Your day starts when you see them coming into school. You take one glance at your student and you know whether they are good, bad or iffy, or what their first needs or first port of call are. You try to start their day the right way so as to get the best out of it for them and make them feel safe, happy and secure.

When I started this job, I was the surrogate mammy. I am now the surrogate nanny. That is what we are. We are counsellors; we are mammy. We are the big sister and the protector. They have nothing to fear from us because we are not the teacher. We are not going to be giving them homework or correcting and we are the go-to person. That is important and that is why we need to be able to speak to their parents, so the parents can tell us what their child is because no two kids are the same and no two days are the same. It is an absolutely fantastic job. I love it and I could not imagine doing anything else but there is so much more we do than clean noses.