Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Education, Deputy Byrne, to the Chamber. I raise the issue of the lack of support provided to children and young people in disadvantaged communities. Such support would allow them to engage in curriculum learning. The DEIS system naturally tends to focus on what is required in schools as regards additional educational support. However, in many disadvantaged schools, there is a substantial need for other qualified professionals to support pupils, such that they can engage meaningfully in their curriculum learning. These are the children who are falling through the gaps and the ones for whom intergenerational poverty, trauma and deprivation will persist.

Professor Selina McCoy and postdoctoral research fellow Dr. Eamonn Carroll, both of the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, argued in a 2022 article that critical metrics in Irish education have remained stubbornly persistent, including the gap in school completion rates between DEIS and non-DEIS schools. They pointed to the findings of Educational Research Centre analysis that highlighted that children experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage were more likely to lose out on learning because of alcohol and drug use, being absent from school and not being attentive in class compared with their majority peers. In addition, they were found likely to have fewer educational resources at home and less likely to aspire to progress in their education.

While schools rightly welcome their DEIS clarification and the additional educational resources it can bring, many DEIS schools experience acute challenges within their student body that simply cannot be met through traditional educational supports. This might be a pre-existing psychological or physical trauma that a child comes to school with because of which he or she is simply unable to access his or her education on a consistent basis. This, of course, impacts the child or children in question but it can also manifest itself in significant disruptions for their classmates and the broader school community.Before curriculum learning can begin for many children in these schools, their immediate needs must first be met. This may require psychological or sociological support or additional minding, nurturing, caring or feeding. These schools need additional targeted support to meet their students and communities’ needs. Equalisation in Irish education, where there is equality in outcome as well as opportunity, can only happen once this disparity is recognised. DEIS in its current form can only go so far in realising this change.

In their 2022 article, Professor McCoy and Dr. Carroll advised that educational inequality is a systematic phenomenon which must be addressed structurally and not just in the classroom. School staff can only do so much in trying to overcome what happens outside the classroom for their pupils, where children are living in poverty, their parents are in addiction, their home is a hotel room or they have been waiting months or years for access to therapeutic supports or mental health services. In recent months, I have been working with St. Aidan’s Senior National School in Brookfield on this issue with one of the brilliant school staff members, Dallas Hartland. In St. Aidan’s and many schools like it, over one quarter of pupils experience significant trauma annually. It is hard to comprehend how common this for children is in these schools compared with those who might be called "normal" children in Ireland. They are two vastly different lived experiences and there are two vastly different educational experiences as a result.

I raise this matter because every year politicians celebrate and advocate for DEIS status for schools. I come from a community where I see what is needed in addition to DEIS. It feels as if the idea of DEIS has become somewhat diluted and it is not reaching the children who need the most help.