Children's advocacy group seeks €5m fund to support poverty-stricken students

Children's Rights Alliance's Tanya Ward said that recent budgets have shown 'significant leaps in terms of tackling the cost of accessing education'.

A €5m fund to help non-Deis schools support poverty-stricken students is being sought in Budget 2025, as End Child Poverty Week kicks off.

The plea by the Children’s Rights Alliance also includes a call for the extension of the Free School Books Scheme to senior cycle, while investment is also being sought for alternative and out of school education.

Children’s Rights Alliance chief executive Tanya Ward was speaking ahead of an online seminar on education — one of a series of events taking place this week to address how to tackle child poverty. 

On Thursday last, the issue of alternative care and child welfare will be tackled in a discussion at Nano Nagle Place, where the keynote speakers will include interim National Director of Services and Integration, Tusla, Clare Murphy and executive director of the Child Law Project, Dr Carol Coulter.

Ms Ward said that recent budgets have shown “significant leaps in terms of tackling the cost of accessing education”.

She said: “This back-to-school season, fewer children are spending the day distracted and hungry in class thanks to the Hot School Meals Programme and over 775,000 students will benefit from Free School Books Scheme.” 

However, the Government stopped short of extending the book scheme fully last year to include all second level students. Families pay an enormous amount for their teenagers to go back to school, with the average cost of books alone for a fifth-year student at a staggering €213. Budget 2025 can finish the job and finally remove that financial burden by expanding the Free School Books to Senior Cycle.

She said the Deis scheme has been a sea change in tackling educational disadvantage through the provision of “increased supports such as lower student pupil ratios; access to Home School Community Liaison Officers; access to school completion programmes, as well as literacy and numeracy support.” 

But she said that while such supports can transform the lives of children, they are currently only available to a quarter of the student body.

She added: “The latest report from the OECD (2024) points to the problem of only relying on the Deis programme to address inequality. Less than half of students experiencing disadvantage in 2021 are in Deis schools. 

"While the Deis scheme was expanded in 2022, it still only supports approximately a quarter of students, meaning the vast majority of the school-going population fall outside of Deis schools. The OECD also recommend extending partial additional supports to all students defined as disadvantaged as a way to bridge this gap.” 

She said that many schools in the most disadvantaged areas of the country who have Deis status require further supports “because of the level of acute needs they see in their classrooms as a result of the trauma of child poverty and social exclusion”.

Three in every four students in Ireland attend non-Deis schools. This includes children in families who are scraping together the money to try keep milk and bread in the house. This includes teenagers whose mental health is deteriorating while they sit on a waitlist list. 

Those who are struggling would really benefit from the numeracy and literacy supports, the breakfast and homework cubs, or the access to a Home School Liaison Officer who can work with them one-to-one that the Deis scheme provides. Government has effectively locked these students out of a support system simply because of where they go to school.”