THE Government should set itself the target of totally eliminating early school-leaving within the next five years, a new report by the National Economic and Social Forum has urged. Although the numbers have been falling in recent years, 3,200 young people left school in 1995 without sitting the Junior Certificate exam.
The report, entitled Early School Leavers and Youth Unemployment, which is published today, says as a first step towards reaching this target, the Department of Education should aim for a reduction of 600 in the number of early school-leavers in 1997, at an estimated cost of £1.3 million. Traveller children, who have a very high rate of early school-leaving, should be targeted as an urgent priority group.
The report also recommends that the Department, together with FAS, should aim to increase the number of participants in the Youthreach programme for 15-17 year-olds by 1,000 in the next 12 months, at an estimated cost of £6.3 million.
FAS should also provide an additional 100 places on its specific skills training programme for this target group. The ultimate objective, says the report, should be to have all early school leavers involved in a Youthreach programme.
The NESF acknowledges the good work done by Youthreach, particularly for some of the most educationally disadvantaged, although it suggests reforms in sharing accommodation with schools, support for lone parents, certification, gender-proofing and inter-departmental co-ordination.
It notes that what most unemployed early school-leavers want is a job. "The success of Youthreach, in attracting more clients than it has places for, may be partly explained by the fact that it pays an allowance and has the appearance of a job to its potential clients."
The report also recommends that the Department of Enterprise and Employment, together with FAS and the Local Employment Service, should quickly introduce a pilot scheme for 18-21 year olds from disadvantaged backgrounds who have left school early with no educational qualifications and have been unemployed for most of the intervening period.
This scheme should provide an additional 750 places on community employment schemes at an estimated cost of £2.4 million and an additional 300 Vocational Training Opportunities Scheme places, at an estimated cost of £1.5 million. If this pilot scheme is successful, it should be extended to cover all the approximately 2,800 young people with no educational qualifications in this age group.
The report has three other key recommendations that `second chance' education should be directed at the most is advantaged, with provision for childcare costs and literacy and numerary programmes; a new high level inter-departmental working group should be set up to oversee the implementation of the NESF's recommendations and the Department of Education should work with other Departments and agencies to promote a `whole community' approach to educational disadvantage by linking parents, schools, community groups and employers in an area to work together to address everything from inadequate income and poor housing to absence of study facilities and curricular reform.
Other specific recommendations include the abolition of examination fees for disadvantaged families and the development of `tracking mechanisms' by which schools would be responsible for monitoring students' attendance levels, suspensions, expulsions and drop-outs so that the young people concerned can be helped properly.
The NESF estimates the total cost of its recommendations at around £12 million. It concedes this will require changes in government spending priorities, and suggests savings made because of declining pupil numbers could be diverted to fund its proposals.
THE education office of the Conference of Religious of Ireland welcomed the NESF report as the latest in a series of reports which underlined the link between education and poverty in Ireland, and recommended similar policies to deal with it.
However its director, Sister Teresa McCormack, questioned whether the political will existed to "undertake the kind of radical change of direction" suggested by the report. The Education Bill at the Budget, she said, had two recent opportunities to show that such will existed and they had been missed.
She criticised the Bill for failing to provide a legislative framework for tackling disadvantage. For example, the Bill had not provided for a committee to be attached to each regional education board to deal with issues of disadvantage, nor for any targetting of resources to the disadvantaged in the criteria for funding schools.
Similarly, she criticised the Budget for not extending the important Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage scheme to more schools for not tackling the unfair nature of the capitation funding system for the increasing disproportion between the funding of third level education, which mainly benefits the better-off, and primary and secondary education and the continued tiny proportion of the education budget given to community and adult education, even though up to 58 per cent of the population left school before 15.
