School truancy - Move away from courts is positive

ANYTHING that helps our cluttered courts and school systems operate more efficiently is to be welcomed.

If that change has other benefits it is doubly welcome.

The move by the National Education Welfare Board — the body established in 2002 to ensure that children either attend school or receive an education elsewhere — has undertaken such an initiative.

The board hopes that it will no longer have to take parents to court to try to ensure that children are sent to school. Though recourse to the courts will always be an option how much better it would be if these matters could be resolved outside a legal framework.

Not every child finds themselves in an environment where the benefits of education, or the dead-end alternative, are fully appreciated.

In these instances the State is right to intervene to help the individual in the first instance and, secondly, to try to ensure that a life of opportunity rather than State-funded dependency follows.

Just this weekend the Teachers’ Union of Ireland, ahead of this week’s annual conference, pointed to the huge cost to the State caused by so many young people leaving school before they might.

The union suggested that the high number of students quitting school without sitting the Leaving Certificate will cost the State more than €100 million each year.

Figures show that almost one-in-five pupils drop out before the exam. In the Dublin area that figure is much closer to one-in-three.

That staggering statistic deserves consideration as it suggests that up to a third of our population have already settled for a life burdened by a lack of formal education. The union warned that student drop-out will increase due to a number of education cuts which target disadvantaged groups.

In these desperate times, when unemployment is climbing to frightening levels it is difficult to see how anyone without a basic education will find work with an income anything above subsistence levels.

The union has made a number of suggestions.

Of course they involve the restoration of funding for various schemes once in the vanguard of the fight against disadvantage but are now left without resources.

Of course they are right but is it just possible that part of the answer lies in their own hands? As we suggested last week very many of the problems in our schools might be resolved if every teacher worked just one more hour a week.

The halving of the jobseekers’ allowance to €100 in last week’s budget may make the prospect of leaving school prematurely less attractive and if it does then it may achieve more than was intended.

In the fight to get children to school in the first instance, the board has initiated court proceedings in more than 160 cases in a little over three years.

Already this year it has opened 21 actions. However, budget cuts mean that a new process has been established and parents will have an opportunity to resolve difficulties by talking to education welfare officers, school principals and possibly social workers and juvenile liaison officers in a bid to avoid court appearances.

Education and imagination will be the catalysts of economic recovery and we must do all we can, including reconsidering teaching practices, to ensure that every person in this country is prepared for the future.