Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I had a very interesting encounter with the Irish Second-Level Students Union yesterday. I spent the afternoon discussing with students from secondary schools up and down the country the issues they are concerned about. It highlighted for me the urgency of radical reform of our secondary school system and a few points should be borne in mind in that regard. One of the things they said was that there is absolutely nowhere for students to go if they are feeling anxious, worried, scared or bullied because we do not really have the necessary staff resources in schools or people who are trained to help. They were very keen on the idea that we would have psychologists in every school so that there would be somewhere to go. They were also scathing about the curriculum in the sense that most of it is rote learning out of books rather than more participatory education involving field trips, visits to museums or theatres, or meetings with people who are specialists and experts in a particular area, whereby they would feel motivated and would participate in their education, rather than just having to learn off books. That was very interesting but obviously it requires resources. They said that buses for things like that were a huge cost that most schools could not incur. They also said that when school inspections happen, the school inspectors never talk to the students about the issues affecting the school. It is all curriculum-based, rather than engaging with the students themselves about the issues affecting them.

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