Mick Clifford: Going back to school without lessons learned

Ukrainian refugees forced to move again, children with additional needs left without a school place, and students and teachers struggling to find — and afford — somewhere to live

Those heading to school with worries about traffic and early starts might consider the plight of the Ukrainian refugees forced to move home once more, the children with additional needs who are without a school place, or the students and teachers unable to afford anywhere to live during the housing crisis.

PAUSE for a minute if you’re lucky enough that this weekend is not one freighted with stress. It can be a difficult time of year.

The summer spent, parents are having to prepare and readjust to getting children out of the scratcher early and off to school.

For children, there is the emotional adjustment, back in the routine, a new class, new faces, days of fatigue until they once again find their rhythm.

Traffic on the road thickens and often slows to a crawl. The traffic updates, happily ignored since the expectant days of June, are back on the radar.

Then, within days, it’s like the summer never happened and the stressometer kicks back in at an elevated reading.

For anybody out there affected by such first-world problems this year, consider yourself lucky.

Think of the plight of the Ukrainian refugees who have to move out of student accommodation this weekend.

Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman said during the week that around 1,500 people will have to vacate the accommodation they have had up until now.

Some of them will move to community halls, others to the tented village established in Gormanston.

This is the launching pad from which they will face into the coming winter, with no let-up in sight back home and the future growing more uncertain by the day.

It would be reassuring to think that they will only have to suffer through such living quarters for a very short period, but all the indications are that it will be a long time before they might again have a proper roof over their heads.

For some cohorts of people, this has always been a stressful, angry, and emotional time of year.

Children with additional needs

The parents of children with additional needs know what it feels like to be excluded when everybody else is trotting back to school.

Every September there has been a scramble to attempt to ensure their offspring is not left sitting at home, separated from peers.

This year, we were told, it would be different. Last May, the Milne family from Dublin told Prime Time of their struggles to get school places for their autistic twin boys Ryan and Kyle, aged 11.

The public reacted with outrage. Minister Josepha Madigan swore blind that the boys, and all children with special needs, would have places this September.

On Wednesday, Ms Madigan told Claire Byrne on RTÉ Radio that the job was oxo. Places for all.

The following day on Prime Time, Gillian Milne burst the balloon.

Contrary to months of spin, her lads don’t have places for the start of the school year.

“Ryan and Kyle have been 11 years at home,” Gillian said.

“We really thought this September was going to be our September.

Why can’t they be like every other child getting ready to go back to school?

“If Ryan and Kyle didn’t have special needs, they would be going to the local school around the corner. There wouldn’t be a problem.”

Now that family is being told that the boys should have a place at the end of October.

The Milnes are not alone. If children with needs can’t get a place this year, following months of publicity around the issue, then when?

Are we to accept that in this developed world, the State is incapable of educating its children, or is it that even now the political will is not strong enough to be bothered?

Spare a thought for the parents who will once again stick a head out their front door and watch the neighbourhood children trotting off to school while their loved one is excluded.

The complete absence of planning in the area of special needs is joined this year by a complete absence of planning in getting to school many children who do have places.

School transport 

In early July, the Government announced free school transport for all in response to the cost-of-living crisis.

That was a positive move, but as with much else to do with the State, proper planning did not kick in straight away.

Now, thousands are families are waiting to hear whether they have a place on a bus to ensure their children get to school.

Surely, in the current environment, more urgency could have been attached to straightening that out?

As for the schools themselves, the housing crisis is beginning to bite.

Principals in Dublin, Cork, and other cities are finding that teachers are heading for the hills, out where they might be able to rent without living in penury and at some point harbour hopes of actually buying a home.

Finding somewhere to live is also now at the forefront of the minds of thousands of students who ordinarily might be facing into the autumn with giddy excitement.

Once upon a not-long ago, student life was, not to put too fine a point on it, the dog’s bollocks. Sandwiched between the regimented existence of school and the long-fingered future of responsibility, students danced on the cusp of adulthood. 

Then came the pandemic and they had to stay at home and Zoom their way through the best years of their lives.

Accommodation crisis

Now, thousands of them are faced with the prospect of having to stay at home or sleep in a car because the cities cannot accommodate students in the manner that had been possible since colleges first came into being.

Heading back to college has a whole new, frightening meaning this year.

All of these strains are occurring in an environment where the coming winter threatens to be savage, with the prospect of fuel poverty kicking in among some cohorts and energy shortages a real possibility.

These are indeed strange days and, for a growing number, frightening times. To blame it all on the Government would be wrong and unfair.

The war in Ukraine and the aftermath of the pandemic have certainly fed into the current crisis. But a feeling lingers that the current administration is still failing to act with sufficient urgency to get the levers of State working to full capacity.

We have, to some extent, been here before, following the economic collapse.

On that occasion the current macro- economic policies were implemented but it is now glaringly obvious that it was those who were most exposed who bore an unfair burden. The current political environment, in which there is growing mistrust of Government, has its origins in how that was handled.

The other serious policy blunder from those times was the complete failure to plan in relation to housing, which directly led to the current crisis.

This Government cannot afford to make similar mistakes this time around. Electorally, it would be a disaster for them. More importantly, it would have a devastating effect once more on those most in need of State assistance in order to get by.