One school, 600 students, and lots of confidence

Marino College is a VEC school in Fairview, Dublin, with 600 students, half at second level and half doing PLC courses. Around 60 per cent of its second-level students come from Dublin's north inner city, many of them from very disadvantaged backgrounds.

"We have one remedial post, but almost all the teachers have to be able to deal with students with a basic level of literacy," says principal Josephine O'Donnell. "The teachers' understanding of the students is vitally important - to get to know them, how they think and act, so they can empathise with them and get their respect."

This is even more so since the majority of teachers come from very different social backgrounds from the students. "When the day comes that we get people from disadvantaged backgrounds going back in as professionals, that will be the day real change will be effected," says O'Donnell.

She is particularly enthusiastic about the Leaving Cert Applied. Half the students who entered the exam last year were the first from their families to take a Leaving Cert; many of their parents would not even have gone on to second level.

"Their pride in doing the Leaving Cert was incredible. It's a huge thing to these families. There is no way these young people would be so confident if they had had to struggle through the academic Leaving Cert."

O'Donnell also praises the home-school liaison scheme, under which Marino has one half-time teacher. However, she and her staff believe home-school liaison would be more useful if it was part of a broader, team-working system.

She would like to see her present class tutors freed from some subject teaching duties so they can greet the class when on arrival in the morning, check for absentees and work with the home-school liaison teacher in talking to parents and visiting homes.

Students should be taught by a much smaller number of teachers, who could then work as a team with the class tutor and the guidance counsellor in sorting out individual children's problems. Such closer student-teacher contact would go some way to preventing students dropping out early, particularly by monitoring those who have poor attendance records, she believes.

She says a major problem, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, is the change from having one teacher all the time at primary, to dealing with up to 10 or 11 different, more anonymous, subject teachers at second level.

She is full of praise for the school's psychologist, supplied by the City of Dublin VEC, who helps teachers to understand the problems of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds - for example, the sheer frustration of a teenager with the reading age of a nine-year-old - and to adapt their teaching methods to help them.

What would she like from the Minister for Education and Science to help her disadvantaged students? She would like a counsellor to help the brightest of them make the hard transition to universities, full of strange students from the other side of the class divide. Most of her students feel more comfortable climbing the ladder more slowly through PLCs and perhaps the ITs.

She would like greater flexibility in the curriculum, with more emphasis on practical exam subjects such as materials technology, home economics and art, and more time for short courses in areas such as photography, health studies, drama, computers and horticulture, which she is able to put on because of the school's large PLC provision. She believes the presence of outsiders such as nurses and photographers helps make the college an attractive place for non-academic children.

The courses such people teach are a way of preventing students leaving school early: "They're very important for disadvantaged children in particular, in that they break up the day and make school much more enjoyable."

O'Donnell ends with a plea to the Government to enforce the 1996 Protection of Young People at Work Act. This lays down that 14-year-olds can only work eight hours a week and 17-year-old Leaving Cert students cannot be employed after 10 p.m.

A lot of teenagers from low-income families work outside school hours, some for 10 hours a week, a few for 30 or more. This means that, with 28 hours in school and up to 10 hours homework, they are often exhausted. "There should be a crackdown on those employers who are breaking the law in this way," she says.