Education

Improving inner city education

innercityeducation A range of social problems have affected education in deprived areas for several decades. Two educationalists tell Peter Cheney about their experiences of working in inner city schools and how strong school-community links can make a difference.

The everyday impact of poverty adds extra problems for teaching in deprived areas but good progress is being made when schools and local communities work out how they can practically serve each other.

Suzanne Marcus teaches at Wheatfield Primary School in North Belfast, where approximately 70 per cent of pupils are entitled to free school meals and 40 per cent have additional identified learning needs e.g. mainly a much lower reading age than expected.

“I never doubt that our parents want the best for their children,” she comments. “However, many of them don’t have access to a strong support network, and are often bringing up their children alone. We, as a school, are eager to support them in whatever ways we can.”

Schools in deprived areas regularly find that some children come to school with no breakfast and insufficient sleep which, in turn, affects their concentration in the classroom. Some children have poor learning experiences before enrolling at school, sometimes not knowing how to open a book or turn its pages.

Many parents, she explains, have had poor experiences of school themselves. Parents are the primary educators for their children and the school runs workshops for parents to help them support their children’s learning in areas such as phonics.

Children, particularly boys, need to have good role models and more motivation to achieve, whether in school or the future world of work. The traditional industries where Protestant working class men and women were employed are no longer open to them and, in her view, not enough has been done to reskill and redirect them into other areas of employment.

Support for schools, in her view, could be improved if the common funding scheme took additional learning needs into account. A few years ago, the school received some extra funding, which made a real practical difference by splitting a larger class between two teachers. The children made “huge strides forward” as “you can do so much more with 13 or 15 children than you can do with 25.”

Funded programmes for children should also involve parents in their education. The school’s Terrific Twos programme (run by Sure Start) helps two-year olds to learn through play and brings their parents in one day a week, to encourage them to interact with their children.

Responsibility

Ethos has an important role in influencing how it relates to its community. Ms Marcus sat on the Church of Ireland Diocese of Down and Dromore’s poverty think tank last year and her passion is to get businesses, churches and community groups involved in helping schools.

For example, volunteers could come and help with reading partnerships, which involve one-to-one reading with a child for three 15-minute slots each week. Through this work, the school has seen the reading ages of some children increase by two years over six months.

Other proposals included homework clubs, offering financial support to cover costs of uniforms etc. and creating genuine friendships with lone parents. While working in the area is “very, very challenging,” she enjoys that challenge and finds her job extremely rewarding.

The strong ethos in Catholic maintained schools is based on a “continuum” of the home, school and church working together, retired principal Michele Marken explains. She was principal of St Joseph’s Secondary School on the Ravenhill Road, in South Belfast, before her retirement in 2008.

A good school, in her view, will build up trust, and convince parents that the school is for them and that the most important thing to the school is their child. If a pupil reported that they were being bullied at the end of the school day, staff would deal with it on the spot, to show the value placed on the child.

Teachers would also visit homes to talk with parents, to show that they trusted them as the “first guardians” of their children, who had placed a “sacred trust” in the staff. Her teachers saw themselves as investing in not just these children but the next generation: “If we want to have good children coming into our school, we’ve got to make good parents.”

Catholic schools have freedom to openly practice their faith but do not have all the answers. “I could point to many of my colleagues in the controlled sector who thought nothing of, at the end of a day, being out and about in their car, down round the flashpoint areas and making sure that children got home safely,” she recalls.

The best schools, she adds, have teachers who “give their time honestly and freely and hopefully are appreciated and rewarded by the results and the outcomes for their young people.” They will also have principals who are “unafraid to speak up for their schools and their young people, to let their children know that they’re on their side so that, no matter what, there is one place that believes in them.”

Ethos, Mrs Marken adds, affects a school’s infrastructure as well as what happens in the classroom. She is concerned by the closures of controlled post-primaries in inner city South and East Belfast, which have resulted in many children travelling to schools outside the city. To her, this trend implies that those children are not valued and a better alternative would be to establish small 11- 14 junior schools closer to home.

Teachers work hard to make their schools as attractive as possible, but some prewar schools are no longer fit for purpose e.g. having no parking places for parents. “A really good school can strengthen the communities that it serves,” she points out, “to such an extent that it can be a huge part of the uplifting of those communities.”

Safe havens in hard times

Schools, Michele Marken recalls, were safe havens for children during the Troubles. Teachers, from all backgrounds, resisted efforts of paramilitaries to get into schools and “held a lot together” over the years: “It was an enormous job that teachers did and very often in very difficult circumstances.”

Each time a life was lost during the Troubles, she would stand in front of her class and say it was wrong to take a life, no matter whose it was. Mrs Marken waited to see whether parents would come in and challenge that stand, but it never happened.

She recalls working in one area, where the school “swung into action” when a sudden death took place in a pupil’s family. The home economics department gathered up its utensils, cups, plates and saucers, made the sandwiches and brought them to the house for the wake; the family wouldn’t have been able to afford that themselves.

“We never talked to anybody, we never said how great [we were], that is just what we did,” she continues. “And we were with people. We didn’t see them as suffering out there. Their pain was shared by us if there was tragedy, as there often was.”

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