Goldenbridge is a name that carries some sad and cruel connotations - which is pretty ironic for the Mercy Secondary School in Goldenbridge, Inchicore, Dublin. This is a girls' school which is fighting hard to give its students a warm and secure environment and a strong education.

Inchicore is an old Dublin area with all the inner city's riches of community, and with some of the problems that face the old communities today. But the school brings its pupils face-to-face with the world of opportunity through a three-way liaison - focusing the students on controlling their own lives and bringing them into contact with new opportunities.

"From second year on our students are invited to do a project for Trinity College Dublin," says Carmel Solon, Goldenbridge principal since 1991. "We have a teacher who liaises with Trinity and three projects are chosen from each year group and three prizes are awarded."

In Transition Year, Trinity awards a gold medal to the Student of the Year. "It's a very big thing in our school and a big advantage to our students."

It's important to the school that students take in the idea that university is an option. "The liaison teacher, Maria Doyle, takes them around Trinity and the parents are also invited in, told how to apply for the college."

Students at Goldenbridge are varied. "Some are looking for As in honours maths in the Leaving Cert, while some still drop out after Junior Cert," says Solon. "Fear of failure will sometimes be the case, though we work very hard to hold them."

One of the advantages of the link with Trinity is that students and student teachers come to the school to give grinds in the run-up to exams. "Girls or boys doing their H Dip come out - for free - and the students see that the people who go to college are ordinary people."

Role models are important - two of the teachers are local people, a past pupil has her solicitor's practice in the area, and an actuary past pupil has offered help to the students.

William Glasser's Reality Therapy theory fuels the Goldenbridge approach to learning. "There would be a safe, warm, supportive environment - lead management rather than boss management - and therefore the teachers would do the same." Working on Glasser's theories, self-evaluation has been brought in for the first time this year for Transition Year students.

"All the evaluation in life is external - and we feel that if people really started to evaluate themselves, there will come a time when nobody will notice them, but if they are strong inside, they're able to do it themselves - they're not going to go to pieces."

Classes are small - in first year, the classes are under 20. "We pride ourselves in the fact that because we're a small school, we can keep much closer contact with our students." A chaplain, Sister Mary Connaughton, has just been brought in, thanks to the Mercy nuns.

"We don't have a full-time counsellor - you have to have 500 to have a full-time counsellor. This area doesn't mean anything, which is crazy."

It can be an advantage, however, because the counsellor comes in on the school's half-day, so students can have privacy in their counselling. "If I'd said something to someone as a kid, would I be worried the next day: `oh, she's gone in telling everyone.' But they don't see her the next day."

The parents' relationship with their children is also central. "I always say to a mother `nobody knows a child like the mother, no teacher, nobody'. And I think you must respect that."

Home-school community liaison teacher Geraldine Mannion has no teaching duties whatever, liaising with parents both in the dedicated parents' room by the primary school gate and in their own homes, and organising parents' classes. "The parents are asked what they would like - last year they asked for maths and Irish, flower-arranging, sewing, swimming, how to manage your teenager, parenting, computers."

The liaison teacher visits every house in the year, concentrating especially on the first-years' parents to make sure the children are settling in. The parents are invited into the school to share their ideas on how the school could develop.