A 14-year-old boy who dropped out of school and became the scourge of his flats complex has just become an apprentice motor mechanic. A 13-year-old girl expelled from school went on to do her Junior Cert and now works in a restaurant. A 14-year-old homeless boy did his Junior Cert and is an apprentice carpet fitter.
These are pupils at the St Vincent's Trust Special Education Project in Henrietta Street in Dublin's north-inner city. They are the children who drop through every safety net offered by mainstream education, the ones from extremely deprived or violent family backgrounds, the no-hopers. And, yet there is hope for some of them. Four years ago the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, whose St Vincent's Trust provides a FAS Community Training Workshop for older teenagers, found there were so many 13- and 14-year-olds being referred to them that they approached the Department of Education for funding to start a scheme for the younger age group.
The Department, increasingly concerned about the problem of early school leavers, was supportive. So in late 1995 two teachers, a ban an ti and 12 children came together for classes in a cramped classroom and kitchen at the back of the Daughters of Charity house behind Henrietta Street's crumbling facades.
Last year the Department asked them to carry on the project for another two years. They said they would do so on condition that they could have a full-time social worker and some part-time teaching help with literacy, craft and other subjects. The civil servants, knowing a good thing when they saw it, readily agreed.
The atmosphere in this inner-city haven is one of extraordinary harmony and commitment to learning as an enjoyable way for children to spend their time. The ban an ti serves up a mid-morning cooked breakfast and lunch. Literacy, numeracy and geography lessons are broken up by board games, art, crafts and computers to keep the attention of children with extremely short concentration spans. There are points for good behaviour - leading to trips to MacDonalds and other city centre attractions - and regular outings for soccer and adventure sports.
One of the secrets of the project's success, says its soft-spoken but utterly determined principal, Sister Eileen Buckley, is its smallness, with a 5:1 pupil-teacher ratio, a social worker and a house mother.
"We have the time and space to work with them one-to-one, treat them with respect, encourage and praise them, so that they feel cherished and loved," she says. Most of the children are referred to the project by school attendance officers, home-school liaison teachers, gardai and social workers. There is a long queue to get in. Last Christmas, with a waiting list of 46 for 10 places, a reluctant decision was taken to accept only young people from the north inner-city, and to turn down referrals from other parts of the city.
The project's second teacher, Fergus Carpenter, says teachers can spot the children who are going to need this kind of special intervention much earlier now. Literacy problems are a key signal; he says a drive against illiteracy at primary level would do a lot to increase the self-esteem and confidence sadly lacking in the kind of children who come to the project, some of whom barely recognise the alphabet.
However, "at the moment the Government knows how many cows and how many sheep there are in the country, but has no way of tracking how many children there are with literacy problems".
A new Department pilot programme for 8-15 year olds will begin to put such a tracking mechanism in place. However, other alternative schooling provision for "at risk" children in this age group remains extremely haphazard.
In Dublin it ranges from the odd community-based initiative such as Carline in Clondalkin, to the single remaining Department-funded Youth Encounter Project at Finglas, before the final "half way to prison" resort of the school for young offenders at Oberstown, to which several St Vincent's Trust teenagers have narrowly avoided being sent by the courts.
