Inspiring educational work with young people in danger of dropping out of school cannot get official funding, writes BREDA O'BRIEN
THIS NEWSPAPER recently featured teachers who sat a paper in the Leaving Cert in their own subject. Brave people, and a worthwhile experiment, as nothing would introduce you better to the stresses students face than sitting part of the Leaving Cert yourself.
However, the teachers were marked by experienced correctors, not by people sanctioned by the Department of Education. Eoin Jackson sat 30 subjects in the real Leaving Cert, alongside his own students. He passed 27 of them, and gained 490 points.
Is the man mad, or what? It turns out he is quite delightfully sane. Talking to him, it is clear that it was not a game, or an attempt to show that the Leaving Cert is easy. Instead, he did it to gain publicity and funding for the XLc Project in Waterford where he has mentored and taught students for 12 years. Many of those students have very troubled experiences of conventional schooling, and some have a long history of failure.
He was trying to show them that there is no reason to be intimidated by the hype about the Leaving. If he could sit 30 subjects, seven should be very manageable for them.
I had been hearing about Eoin, his mother Nuala, and other members of the Jackson clan for years, long before this latest exercise. Nuala Jackson was a teacher in a Waterford city school. About 12 years ago, she became very concerned about a bright young man who was going through tough times and had dropped out of school. She decided she would help him get through the Leaving Cert.
Word of what she was doing spread and other parents begged her to help their children. She ended up with seven Leaving Cert candidates and also some for Junior Cert.
They were all kids considered failures by mainstream education, and some had had brushes with the law. When Nuala, and her son Eoin, who helped her, saw what these young people could achieve with individual attention and resources geared to their needs, she took early retirement with the aim of concentrating her efforts on others like them.
It became the XLc Project, and it has had remarkable success. Not only do the majority of students pass the Leaving Cert, but they also go on to further education and employment. Bear in mind that their main cohort has consisted of pupils who were expelled, or indefinitely suspended.
This year, they had 80 students for the Leaving Cert, including Eoin. Like his mother, Eoin is a qualified teacher, and he presumably could be earning a full salary in a conventional school. Instead, he earns half a salary or thereabouts, working with kids who would be most teachers’ nightmares.
Not all of them, of course. Some have dropped out of school due to bullying. Others are home-educated students, but over the years, they also have had people who used to be involved in drug dealing or other crime. They are all treated the same, no matter what reason brought them to the XLc project.
XLc has never been recognised officially by the Department of Education, although it is recognised as an exam centre by the State Examinations Commission.
As a result, it lacks adequate funding, although it is grateful for support from the Waterford Area Partnership, and from Youth Services. It runs on a shoestring, relying heavily on volunteers and work experience placements from Social Care courses.
Last year, it had to turn away 40 students, and was stretched even dealing with 80. The same is likely to happen this year.
Nuala says she tries to instil three values in her students for future life: make a good home, raise tranquil children, and do work that you enjoy and enhances the world. She obviously succeeded with her own children.
Three other members of the family also help out, along with other dedicated volunteers. She commented wryly they never set out to exist in poverty, but it at least ensures that their students know they are not in it for the money.
It is extraordinary that an initiative like this, that is reaching young people who might have once had more prospect of prison than further education, receives no official support from the Department of Education.
The XLc project is caught in a bind. Charities and funding agencies rave about the work, but have some criticisms. They worry that it is personality-driven and not replicable. In other words, the patience, enthusiasm, and sheer enjoyment of young people that the Jacksons and the other volunteers show, is so special that it could not be done elsewhere.
The XLc project people don’t agree. The problem is not, they argue, that the project is not replicable, but that people are not willing to experiment, and incorporate some of their methods into mainstream education.
One young woman who did work experience with them, went on to qualify as a social worker and used XLc methods successfully with Junior Cert students in Dublin. As a second-level teacher myself, I suspect some teachers are threatened. What if more students opted for XLc, which relies heavily on teaching in small groups, peer tutoring, and identification of learning styles?
Eoin also uses Bebo to set quizzes and has a YouTube channel and a Facebook page. In conventional schools, access to all three is barred for students and teachers. However, it is not about online resources. It is about individual care and attention, and dogged determination to see young people succeed.
Funding agencies are also reluctant to invest as it is so obvious it should be funded by the Department of Education. So XLc is caught between a rock and a hard place.
XLc helps kids experience success and enjoy learning. People who would otherwise have become casualties contribute positively to our society. When our Department of Education doesn’t fund XLc, doesn’t it make you wonder what they think education is for?