Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I thank the Leas Cheann Comhairle for giving me the opportunity to raise the very difficult issue of the senior primary school, Mary Mother of Hope national school, in Littlepace in Clonee, Dublin 15. This is about the situation in Dublin West, where the vast bulk of primary and secondary schools have high numbers of international children. A number of primary schools have over 70% of international children, and some schools have up to 40 different nationalities.

The critical education support for education in this case has been English language teachers. These are now under review, even though officials in the Department of Education and Skills know that the Dublin 15 area includes many children who do not have English as a mother language. The decision by the Department and the Minister to cut further the teaching allocation to Mary Mother of Hope senior national school may result in very serious long-term consequences for the 107 international children who do not have English as their mother tongue and who desperately need English language classes to ensure that they can participate and prosper in the education system.

Mary Mother of Hope senior national school will have only one English language support teacher for its 400 pupils from next September, compared to the three teachers it had for the 300 pupils it had only two years ago. The school caters not just for the local Irish population, but for a very large population of international children. It finds that because it is a senior cycle school, it is now suffering severe cuts because the Department officials argue that children only need two years of English language support.

To date, schools, teachers, boards of management and patrons in Dublin West, and other areas with high numbers of international children, have done fantastic work in developing the children's language skills. However, unless language skills are a specific focus over the entire course of a child's education, the child may well acquire speaking fluency without acquiring the academic fluency he or she needs to pursue further education.

It is incredibly important that we do not create a situation where because newcomers lack English language skills, they begin to fall back on academic achievement in schools because they simply have not acquired academic fluency in English. They become disaffected in secondary school and they drop out. We are then in serious danger of repeating the pattern with which the Minister is all too familiar, where young boys drop out because they cannot connect with achievement in their schools. If we do that, we are on the road to ghettoisation and to producing very large numbers of disaffected teenagers. Some of that is already happening to some extent.

There are two ways to approach this. The Department needs to keep supplying English language teachers, or allow school principals more flexibility in using and distributing resources. I go to places like Dublin 4 and Dublin South and the school children are all Irish and all white. If people come out to my constituency, 25-30% of the children are international. That has been very successful, but the key to the success is that children in school need a chance at success and they have to be able to integrate. Language is the bedrock of integration. It is extraordinarily short sighted for the Government to deprive children of English language education. It will cost an incredible amount in social and economic integration in the long run.

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