Schools expect ‘surge’ of Ukrainian pupils after Easter break

Irish schools could face a “very problematic scenario” by September if additional resources are not put in place over the summer to deal with the influx of Ukrainian children arriving, teachers’ unions say.

Schools should be able to manage to integrate Ukrainian pupils over the final term in the coming weeks, but September will be "a wholly different matter", Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) president Martin Marjoram said.

“There’s capacity to deal with what’s expected to come between now and the summer. We might just be able to manage that if the current rates continue,” he said. “But September is when we’re expecting the system to really come under much greater strain.”

Official figures show there are almost 4,000 Ukrainian children enrolled in Irish schools, with more than 2,000 at primary level and 1,800 at second level.

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Thousands more are expected to enrol over the coming weeks, given that one third of the estimated 23,000 Ukrainian refugees who have arrived in the State are children.

Minister for Education Norma Foley said it was very difficult to quantify how many would ultimately require school places, but that there was “significant” capacity in the system.

She said on Sunday that a survey of post-primary schools found there were 15,000-18,000 spare places, based on a response rate of 75 per cent of schools. It is estimated that that there are about 25,000 spare places in primary schools.

Ms Foley told RTÉ radio’s This Week programme that “significant work” had been done to support students and schools so far. More than 260 primary schools had successfully applied for additional hours or posts, while an announcement on supporting post-primary students was due shortly.

This is likely to include providing tutors with a background of teaching English as a foreign language to second-level students and their families through the State’s 16 education and training boards.

Larger classrooms

John Boyle, general secretary of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO), said he was not overly concerned about a lack of spaces for children come September given the drop in enrolments at primary level in recent years.

However, he said the increase will result in children being “packed into the largest classrooms in Europe”, as was the situation in Ireland a few years ago.

While primary schools are “coping perfectly fine” so far, schools expect a “surge” of enrolments after the Easter break, said Mr Boyle, who added that the majority of those already enrolled were spread across Dublin, Kerry, Clare, Mayo and Cork.

“It’s felt there are at least 2,000 more children who have not enrolled yet,” he said. “We never expected them to enrol straight away; we knew there would be a time lag. But the Easter break will exacerbate that, and with hundreds of people arriving every day, by the time we get to April 25th there could be a lot of children without a place.”

While many teachers already have experience working with refugee children, Mr Boyle said no one had dealt with the “scale” of so many new arrivals at once.

Additional teacher training over the summer months would be needed, along with English-language tutors, the TUI and INTO said.

“The bigger concern is as more refugees arrive, those who have stayed in the country and have seen more of the horrors of what’s going on, they’ll need psychological services,” Mr Marjoram said. “That will need to ramp up fairly considerably”.

Mr Marjoram and Mr Boyle said the weekly consultation system between school representatives and department officials, which was implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, had been a hugely important arena for discussion since Ukrainian refugees started arriving in Ireland last month.

“For all that Covid was dreadful and obviously visited terrible things upon families in different ways, the response to the crisis did enable us to work in a far more collegiate way,” said Mr Marjoram. “Those meetings were constructive and solution focused and allowed us to build for now, which is potentially going to be an even bigger crisis in terms of what it might do regarding capacity for schools.”