The largely one-size-fits-all education system we have created in Ireland does not easily accommodate children who need to attend special classes, special schools, or receive specialised pre-school places and early intervention. All the State can offer them is home tuition as an “interim plan”, which is rife with problems, and almost always morphs into a “never-ending plan”.
That’s not good enough. Children and young people time and time again say they want to be in school to make friends. That simply can’t happen if they are confined to learning at home.
Parents, teachers and everyone else in between have felt helpless seeing Leaving Cert students endure unbearable levels of stress
Based on the experiences of children, the chief executive of AsIAm, Adam Harris, has described our education system as “broken” and he’s right. But let’s not be under any illusion that all is well for neurotypical children either. The education system just doesn’t work for all children of all ages, of all abilities, and from all backgrounds. Swathes of evidence from our helpline, our members and other valued stakeholders, such as Dr Niall Muldoon, the Ombudsman for Children, make it an undisputable fact that a great number of children in Ireland are being denied their basic right to an education.
That’s why we’re holding a cross-party debate on the future of education in Ireland this week, and calling for parties to come together and deliver a radical overhaul of our education system. At the Children’s Rights Alliance we vehemently believe that the education system is not beyond repair, if politicians step up and work together to turn rhetoric into reality.
Calls for reform have been coming thick and fast since Covid-19 wreaked havoc on all our lives, from columnist Fintan O’Toole to Tom Boland, the former chief executive of the Higher Education Authority. We’ve endured so much this past year and I think the pandemic is forcing the issue by exposing the limitations of our one-size-fits-all education system, and by proving that we can do things differently when we set our minds to it.
In terms of limitations, the system has creaked loudly under the weight and rigidity of the Leaving Cert examinations during Covid-19. Parents, teachers and everyone else in between have felt helpless seeing Leaving Cert students endure unbearable levels of stress and plummeting wellbeing. At the same time, our politicians and education stakeholders have shown they are able to respond and adapt. On foot of a global pandemic, the Government decided to prioritise education for children over other sectors. And our leaders in education worked hard to get our schools open.
Not fit for purpose
In recent days, Alliance Member Inclusion Ireland has raised its concerns that the Government’s enhanced Summer Programme for children with additional educational needs will fail, because of extremely low take-up among schools, real difficulties among parents in sourcing home-based tutors, and the exclusion of children with mild intellectual disabilities in mainstream education, and children with high support needs from the scheme by schools and tutors.
For more and more of us, the penny is dropping – our education system is not fit for purpose.
We know one in two children living in poverty are not in a Deis school
Yet Covid-19 has also exposed what things could be like. We have seen how the State can shift its behaviour, most notably when it intervened to pay the wages of our early years’ educators. We also saw glimpses of a truly inclusive and rights-based education system when, during the negotiations to reopen schools during lockdown, the State engaged positively with the voice of children and young people through our member, the Irish Secondary Students’ Union (ISSU).
But many deep-seated issues need to be resolved. Our young children, unlike their older counterparts, are still denied their right to an education, despite agreement to invest in a “publicly funded, accessible and regulated model of childcare over the next decade”.
We know one in two children living in poverty are not in a Deis school (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools), yet when they do find a place, they continue to have lower educational aspirations compared to their peers in other schools.
Three years on, we are still waiting for the Department of Education’s strategy for alternative education, which would help support a cohort of children who have disengaged with the mainstream education system or are at risk of doing so. Rather than increased use of reduced timetables, let’s create opportunities for all children to learn in an alternative education setting (like Cork Life Centre for example).
We are passionate about getting children – of all ages – the education they deserve; returning to the education system as it once was, won’t make their futures brighter.