A New Life:From her experience as a nurse, Naomi Foley was used to communicating with children before she moved into a career in education, writes Gráinne Faller
It had been a long road of training and work for Dubliner Naomi Foley. She loved her job as a nurse and applying for the postgraduate qualification in primary teaching was almost an afterthought.
"It's not that I wasn't happy where I was, but the applications came around and I decided to apply," she says. "I never thought I'd actually get it."
Working with children was not a life-long ambition for Foley. She had been working as a nurse in Australia in 2002 - a stint in Sydney was followed by some time spent working in an outback hospital. It was there that she realised paediatric nursing was for her.
The hospital, in the tiny town of Warren in north New South Wales, was small but busy. Fewer staff meant that Foley dealt with a much broader range of cases than she ever had before. "I remember late one night a little baby came in and I was the only nurse there. I wouldn't have been used to dealing with children but I couldn't exactly stand back," she says.
Foley found she enjoyed working with children and their parents and decided to specialise in children's nursing on her return to Ireland.
Having trained in St Vincent's Hospital and completing her nursing degree in UCD, Foley had worked for two years in St Vincent's before travelling to Australia. On her arrival back in Ireland, she secured a training place in Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin. The experience was varied and Foley worked in a whole array of specialties.
"I loved it," says Foley. "In children's nursing you are dealing with everyone from babies to 16 year-olds. There's just a huge range in how much they understand and how much you can explain . . . Communication with parents was a huge part of it as well."
Foley worked as an agency nurse for some time after she had finished her training. It was then she decided to apply for the higher diploma in primary education. She was, in many ways, an ideal candidate. She had experience of dealing with children, a good level of Irish thanks to her Gaelscoil education and a great interest in music. Nonetheless, she was still shocked to learn that she had been accepted onto the programme in Froebel College of Education.
She insists that the change from nursing to teaching wasn't as big as it might appear at first. "What people don't realise is that I was teaching everyday in Crumlin. As a nurse, you're teaching children how to manage lifelong conditions. Sometimes you're just teaching someone how to swallow a tablet. Communication is a huge part of what nurses do," she says.
The relatively recent experience of studying for the nursing exams meant that she quickly fell back into the college mode. Teacher training presented other challenges, however.
"I hadn't done art since primary school," says Foley. "That was really strange, although I got back into it."
Although she describes the training in Froebel College as "excellent", nothing could have prepared her for her first teaching experience. "I remember meeting my inspector for the first time and saying, 'Oh my God, how am I going to manage?' She just said, 'You're a nurse. You've done this a million times.'
"It was daunting at first but once you're in there you just adjust. I found myself wondering why I was so worried," she says.
Naturally, there were challenges. "When you go from nursing where you have, at most, a room of four or five children, to teaching - where you have 17 children in a room and children who aren't ill at that - it can be challenging," she says.
On graduating from Froebel, Foley was offered a job in Our Lady of Good Counsel Junior National School in Drimnagh, the school that her parents attended. "It's just beside Crumlin Hospital too so I didn't move far," she laughs. The school was "fantastic" when she was starting off. "I just had huge support from teachers and the principal. It made the whole experience so much easier."
Now a junior infants' teacher, she finds accommodating the different abilities within her classes a challenging but rewarding part of her job. "You have to be flexible and change your notes and plans to suit the children," she says.
But on the whole she enjoys the flexibility that being in charge of one's own class allows. "If you don't get something done with your class on one day, you can always do it the following day. You can tell what the children are able for at any particular time."
Foley views the move into teaching as a side-step. "I love both jobs," she says. "I think if I had stayed in nursing I would have moved into an educational role by now."
She has not left her original career behind, however. Still a registered nurse, she does agency work from time to time. Getting married this summer stood in the way of that recently, but she intends to keep it up.
"I'll be teaching for the foreseeable future," Foley says. "But I never like it when people say that I used to be a nurse. As far as I'm concerned, I'm still a nurse, but I'm a teacher as well."