The phone lines are buzzing between eight innercity schools in Dublin as an EU-backed project to improve school life gets off the ground. The schools, which have 75 teachers, want to improve the overall school experience of their 800 students.
The Dublin Inner City Primary School Initiative, which was launched earlier this year, plans to involve local communities so that various skills and resources can be passed on to enrich school life. Over the coming months, the project will get under way through a series of meetings, in-service courses, investment and networking.
Support for teachers in their classrooms has already been provided by institutions such as DIT, the Ark Childrens' Centre, the Royal College of Surgeons and Friends Provident Insurance Company.
Project manager Brian Tubbert says that the aim is to help the schools "become more integrated with the community. The idea is to cut down on the isolation of schools." The eight schools are based in the most severely disadvantaged areas of the city.
Tubbert is busy meeting representatives from the world of business, theatre, technology and statutory bodies. The initiative has come about through the Dublin Inner City Partnership which targets the long-term unemployed.
Through the planned in-service courses, teachers will be able to network with each other and share knowledge and expertise. Together, he says, they have already targeted a number of areas in which they want to learn to improve teaching skills or acquire new ones - among them are literacy, maths, IT, the arts, whole-school development and alternative strategies of learning.
`WE want to ensure that these children have the same access as other children to art, music, drama, proper PE facilities, gardens, computers, psychological services and in-service training for the teacher," says Brian Tubbert. He points out that, not only are the schools in severely disadvantaged areas, but the large, old buildings cause great problems of heating and maintenance.
In other communities these problems would be solved through fund-raising, but in the inner city such a solution is more difficult. "Money is not the most important thing," says Tubbert. "It's having the organisation and the bureacratic flexibility which would allow the likes of myself to free up teachers to develop their skills, to liaise with community groups, to liaise with statutory bodies."
All the schools have teaching principals, he points out. "Who is there to answer the phone?" Tubbert says that there are up to 28 formal bodies which will contact any one of these schools on a regular basis - not to mention the angry parent, the accident in the school-yard, the quest for a substitute teacher. If schools could have an administrative principal, he maintains that attendance would improve dramatically. In one school where this was the case, there was an overall seven per cent increase in attendance in one year.
The EU is funding the initiative through the Dublin Inner City Partnership to the tune of £80,000 annually. It is expected to run for three years.
The Dublin schools involved are: St Gabriel's National School; Francis Street CBS; Scoil Chaitriona; St Laurence O'Toole's CBS; St Patrick's Boys National School; City Quay National School; Central Model Junior National School; Central Model Senior School.
