Almost half of the primary schoolchildren in some of Dublin’s most socioeconomically disadvantaged communities have suffered major personal trauma while 54 per cent are estimated to require support teaching, according to a survey of principals at 17 Deis schools in west Tallaght, Ballymun and Darndale.
The research was carried out in April by a group of principals describing themselves as the Deis Cluster Advocacy Group.
It said multidisciplinary teams made up of counsellors, psychologists, speech and language therapists as well as occupational therapists were required in their schools to work with children while there was also a need for additional teaching posts and classroom space dedicated to implementing trauma-informed practices and interventions.
The survey results suggest 48 per cent of the almost 3,500 children attending the 17 schools have first-hand experience of traumas ranging from homelessness to the loss of a close family member to a violent death, to witnessing or being the target of some form of abuse.
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More than 400 are said to be awaiting Assessments of Needs (AONs) and more than 40 per cent miss more than 20 days of school each year. The principals report high levels of issues with literacy and numeracy.
Tallaght Community National School principal Conor McCarthy said the issues involved had been raised with the Department of Education but decisions on what action might be taken had been deferred until after the forthcoming publication of an OECD report on the Deis school system.
He said about 100 Deis primary schools, many of them in Dublin, had such high concentrations of children with a need for particular supports that a new, higher classification than the existing Band 1 was required.
The schools involved, he said, should get the multidisciplinary teams required to work with children as well as additional teachers and other supports.
“This is not news to the Department of Education and it’s certainly not news to the child poverty unit in the Department of the Taoiseach, who we’ve met as well,” he says.
“They know there are about 100 schools of the 3,500 primary schools which are located in areas like west Tallaght, northeast inner city Dublin, north Dublin and in other pockets in Limerick, Cork, Waterford… not a huge number of schools but schools that have a level of socioeconomic disadvantage which is far greater than even the majority of schools that are currently categorised as Deis 1, which would be seen at the moment as the most disadvantaged.
“These schools have four times the number of children that need support teaching compared with a non-Deis school, twice as much support teaching needed compared with a Deis Band 1 school. And all of that is just compounded by the long waiting lists which exist within the primary care systems in our areas. So children aren’t getting assessed and then can’t get therapeutic supports once they are assessed.
“On top of that,” Mr McCarthy said, “there is the number of children who have experienced trauma – real, direct trauma – during their childhood which makes it very difficult for schools to close any kind of an academic gap, because there are so many additional needs that they’re trying to support before a child gets to the point where they are in a position to learn in a classroom.”
He said the sort of supports they schools were looking for had been provided to an existing cluster of schools in northeast inner city Dublin on a pilot basis with, he said, very positive results.
In the meantime, he said, the Minister for Education and department had prioritised initiatives like the provision of hot school meals and free schoolbooks. “All of which is very admirable,” he said, “but these represent chunks of money spent on every single child rather than targeted supports towards the most vulnerable.”
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