'No way you can do literacy or numeracy with a child who has suffered trauma in the morning'
Philip Fitzgerald, principal of St Joseph's Senior National School in Ballymun, Dublin: 'The reality is we need something extra than what’s currently available in the Deis programme.' Picture: Moya Nolan
Come September, principal Shane Loftus will have spent the bones of three decades working at Our Lady Immaculate Senior School in Darndale, Dublin 17.
Originally from Mayo, he joined the school in 1995 shortly after he finished college.
“I’ve gone from being the youngest member of staff to the oldest teacher on staff at this stage,” said Mr Loftus.
“Children who are in the school now are the children of parents I taught.”
Darndale is among the most disadvantaged areas in the country, ranked as the most deprived electoral area in the capital by state agency Pobal in its most recent deprivation index.
Factoring in stats on unemployment, educational attainment, and lone-parent ratio from 2016 Census data, Pobal’s deprivation index mapped the geographical areas across Ireland’s towns and cities where poverty remains entrenched.
“It was originally set up to rehouse people from flats in the inner city when they were torn down in the 1970s. As a local authority, Dublin City Council estate, there were always deficiencies in the plan.
“It was low-rise, high-density but there were absolutely no facilities put in at the time and the area has been playing catch-up ever since.
“That part of Dublin would still have the lowest attendance rates for third level for any part of the country.
“It has its problems, and there are many, but the vast amount of people living there are the nicest you would meet anywhere.”
Our Lady Immaculate Senior School is categorised by the Department of Education as a Deis Band 1 school, meaning it is allocated resources, supports, and staffing intended to acknowledge the disadvantaged circumstances of the school’s students and to go some way towards bridging inequality.
Launched in 2005, the Deis programme is now at its largest ever following a major expansion launched last year.
More than 240,000 students at 1,200 schools are now supported through the scheme, which sees eligible schools gaining access to home school community liaison officers, lower pupil-teacher ratios, grant funding, and the School Completion Programme.
However, Deis Band 1 primary school principals in some of the country’s most disadvantaged areas have spoken to the about the flaws they see in the current policy.
On top of the challenges each school day brings, these schools work in areas of concentrated disadvantage where children and their families can also be deeply affected by social issues such as drug use and addiction, alcohol abuse, drug dealing and high crime rates, feuds, high unemployment, and mental health issues.
If you had asked Mr Loftus a few years ago what the particular challenges of teaching in his school are, he would have given a completely different answer.
Now, in 2023, a lot of the school’s work is focused on trauma and the effect this has on children and their education.
“I now view the issues quite differently.
“A lot of the work that has been done, especially in the States and in the UK, is identifying that poverty can have similar effects on people as be it going to war, witnessing a crime, or being a victim of a crime. It’s wrapped into your mental self and it's very difficult to break away from that.
“It’s embedded, the damage that can be done to people when they are young.
"Most of all of the kids we’re dealing with have come from some sort of trauma. For some it might just be poverty, for others it might be poverty and neglect, for others it might be poverty and being witness to a crime.
“It might be living in a home where there might be alcohol or drug abuse. When you build up those multiple traumas for kids then, it just changes the way that we have to engage with them.
“We’re spending more time considering each child as they come in in the morning, keeping a close eye. You don’t know what may have happened in that house in the morning, you don’t know what may have happened when they left the house, before they got to school.
“There is no way you can do a literacy or numeracy programme with a child who has suffered a trauma in the morning, they’re not ready for it.
"There are children who go out onto the yard, and something might happen that for me and you might be entirely innocuous, but something triggers for them and we have to try to get to the bottom of that and sit with that child.”
To ‘re-centre’ a child to get them to a place where they can engage in the school day, the school finds them a safe space for them to sit down and chat to a teacher, maybe alongside a slice of toast and a cup of tea.
“It might just be to sit on a beanbag in absolute quiet for five minutes, it might be to play with Play-Doh, things like that.”
While ‘fight or flight’ is more widely recognised as a common trauma response, schools are now starting to pick up on another — freezing.
“Where the child freezes, where the child just goes totally into themselves and just blocks out the rest of the world.”
Mr Loftus, in his experience, believes the current Deis model does not go far enough to factor in sustained, long-term intergenerational poverty.
The experience of his school does not match the experience of every Deis Band 1 school.
“For a long time, I wasn’t able to put my finger on it, I wasn’t able to verbalise it. I would have known through my work as a home school liaison teacher others who were in Deis Band 1 schools, and their stories had nothing to do with mine.
“There were other teachers from other schools who were very close to us in Dublin 17 — we had very little in common. Our day-to-day was so different and so far removed from theirs.
“The Deis model that is there is absolutely right for a large number of schools that are in it, but for schools on the fringe, like we would be, it’s not that it doesn’t work for us, God knows, we need every support that we can get, but the thinking behind it is flawed.
“The interventions we’re putting in place, we’re doing as teachers. What a lot of those children need in order to deal with a trauma is a therapist, someone who is trained. All we’re doing literally is putting our finger in the dam before it explodes.”
Having worked in Deis schools for the past 11 years, Tallaght Community National School principal Conor McCarthy shares the same concerns about the Deis programme as Mr Loftus.
He should be an administrative principal but due to the extreme teacher shortage in Dublin, and particularly in Tallaght, he taught a class last year and will probably teach again this year.
Overall, the Deis programme has contributed towards the improvement of attainment levels and retention levels for a lot of its targets, he believes.
“Deis schools now are happier, calmer, safer places because of the reduced pupil-teacher ratio, and what the continuous professional development teachers have done over the last 10 to 15 years. That’s all been very successful,” said Mr McCarthy.
However, there is a cohort of Deis Band 1 schools that are facing other challenges when compared to others.
“From speaking to other principals who work in the most disadvantaged areas in the country, who are working with children and families who are doing their level best, there is a level of need there that we cannot meet with the resources that are currently in our school.
“The need isn’t educational, it's more to do with the additional needs better understood now in schools over the last 10 years; social, emotional, behavioural needs.
“Teachers, parents, and the system is now far better at recognising and assessing and diagnosing those needs now but the resources haven’t been put in place to keep up with what is needed.”
As he sees it, the most important and effective resource for schools in the most disadvantaged areas is in-school multi-disciplinary teams, made up of speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, and counsellors.
These teams could provide access on the ground to children badly affected by waiting lists in the primary care system.
“It’s the primary care system which isn’t working for the children in our very disadvantaged areas at the moment.
“In Tallaght where we are, you've got waiting lists of over 3,000 children. You’re talking three, four years in some cases before children get seen or get an intervention programme, which isn’t good enough. It’s making them fall behind, it's not letting them catch up. They are not getting what they are entitled to, or what they deserve.”
The parents he works with are also “completely untrusting” of the primary care system as they have reached a point where they are waiting years for initial assessments for their child.
"When I am talking to them in meetings, really the only tool we have from a practical, intervention standpoint is the primary care system because these parents can’t afford to get private speech and language therapy or occupational therapy or counselling.
He points to the success of Dublin’s north-east inner city regeneration programme, set up in 2016.
“There were clusters of therapists that would work with three or four schools, week in, week out, and would target children one-to-one. They would work with parents, and they also supported staff.”
The number of schools in very disadvantaged areas is small nationally, he believes, estimating up to 100 schools across the country could benefit from a new Deis+ designation.
Principal of Cnoc Mhuire Senior School in Killinardan, Dublin, Orla Hanahoe began her career teaching as part of the Breaking the Cycle initiative in Dublin, a pilot project aimed at offsetting the effects of educational disadvantage.
“I’m teaching some of the children of those students now. That connection that you’d feel because you’ve taught the child, and you know the child and you know their parents, it really helps," said Ms Hanahoe.
“It’s very rewarding work but what separates us is that the school is in an area where there is a concentrated disadvantage.
“There is an exceptional level of additional needs, like educational, social, and emotional.
“The only support parents really have is the school. If they are worried about their child or they are finding it hard to manage their behaviour at home, I’d refer them to the HSE clinical psychology drop-in service but there’s a two-year wait.
“I really feel that there’s no support for them. We’re trying to help them. You’d tell them to go to the GP and get referred but the waiting lists are so long.
“We would have children who are autistic and who are in our autism class and they have never seen an occupational therapist or a speech and language therapist or had a review assessment. There are some children with severe needs who have never had any therapies.”
The most recent National Assessment of Mathematics and English Reading report found that there still is a substantial gap between the performance of children in Deis Band 1 and non-Deis schools.
Given the upheaval caused by covid, it was taken as a win that this gap did not widen significantly over the course of the pandemic.
However, there are still significant gaps. The study found that two out of every five children in second class in Deis Band 1 schools were classed as "low reading achievers".
Almost half of all sixth-class pupils in those schools were categorised as "low achievers" in maths.
A lot of ‘invisible’ work goes into setting children up for the day when they are affected by severe disadvantage, said Ms Hanahoe.
“We put a lot of work into connection and relationships and building up trust. The education comes after that because you have to check in with the children before we do anything.
“In my own thinking, I’ve come full circle. When I started off as principal, I was pushing to raise the scores in numeracy and literacy and put a lot of work into that. We’ve nearly pulled back in recent years since covid, and we’re putting more time into wellbeing.
“We want the children to be able to listen and engage. If the children who are finding it very difficult to engage in school, if they are getting time out in a very nurturing environment in a small group, that’s benefiting them and the rest of the class.
"But we can’t do enough. We’re really trying to do our best, but you sort out one problem and another problem pops up.
“We actually can’t meet all their needs, we are firefighting and we are doing our best. We have a care team meeting every Monday and we could have four or five children that we’re worried about. It could be anything — worried about their learning, their behaviour. They may have gone very quiet, they may have gone very loud. There are always children who we are worried about.”
Philip Fitzgerald is principal of St Joseph's Senior National School in Ballymun.
In 2021, a report by former lord mayor of Dublin Andrew Montague identified that Ballymun had suffered from serious criminality in recent years associated with a surge in crack cocaine usage and open drug dealing, and warned that many young people are getting drawn into this criminal activity.
It noted that while “remarkable work” is carried out every day in Ballymun to improve children’s wellbeing, there are significant challenges in providing adequate supports for children growing up in difficult environments.
“There are social issues around the school, and that’s the type of stuff these schools are dealing with on a regular basis,” said Mr Fitzgerald.
"You are talking about schools that are in areas that are very, very disadvantaged. More so than other areas and they have been so for generations.
“The reality is we need something extra than what’s currently available in the Deis programme.”
As a senior school, he will have children join the school in September as third-class students who are still awaiting diagnosis.
“Look, this is a problem across the board, it’s a problem for every school, but when you put it on top of everything else these children go through, it’s a huge issue.
The school has introduced a ‘nurture’ classroom to much success.
“It's phenomenal. It’s the most obvious thing you can see progress in. You are talking about some of the most traumatised children who have been affected by issues like domestic violence or suicide and this is only the tip of the iceberg.
“You’re going to have a generation here who’s also gone through homelessness as well as the other social issues that goes on in these communities.
“What we’d really want is an extra teacher for this classroom that will address the trauma that some of these children have gone through.
“We have the data there. It’s a minimal cost really, it's an extra teacher and training around adverse childhood experiences."
Earlier this month, Education Minister Norma Foley initiated an OECD review of the current resource allocation model for the Deis programme.
“We know all this stuff already,” said Mr Fitzgerald. “We don’t need to look back.
"The Deis programme was successful in a lot of ways. There are flaws in it but there are flaws in everything. This does work, this can work.
“It’s not a huge amount of schools, it's very easy to set it up as a pilot initially and work from there.”
A spokesman for the Department of Education said it is continuing to work towards “achieving its vision for an inclusive education system which supports all learners to achieve their potential".
“It also recognises that we need to target resources to those schools who need them most.
“That is why the department has undertaken a programme of work to explore the allocation of resources to schools to address educational disadvantage.”
The OECD review will provide an independent expert opinion on the current resource allocation model for the Deis programme and, drawing on international examples, inform a policy approach for an equitable distribution of supplementary resources to support students at risk of educational disadvantage attending all schools, both Deis and non-Deis, he added.
“The OECD review will be complemented by a programme of work by the department which will look at reviewing individual resources and allocation approaches.
“This work will consider the allocation of resources within the Deis programme. It will also seek to ensure that schools are supported to ensure every child has an equal opportunity to achieve their potential.”
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