There is currently no support for the particular educational needs of asylum-seekers' children from the Department of Education and Science or any other Government agency, according to a draft report from the INTO.
The report from the primary teachers' union points out that 4,700 asylum-seekers were living in Ireland up to the end of February, with about 100 new arrivals every week. "For the majority of the children of these families there is a complete lack of provision of appropriate educational support", it says. The only support currently given to them is provided by an under-funded voluntary body, the Irish Refugee Council.
Although the Refugee Council does not see its role as an official educational support service for refugee children, it is forced to provide an "outreach teacher support service" for asylum-seekers' children in the Dublin and Ennis areas "as a crisis-management response to schools which are finding it difficult to cope with the numbers of these children being enrolled in Irish schools".
In January the council had seven volunteers, either retired or newly-qualified teachers, supporting 54 children in five schools. None of them is qualified or trained to teach English as a second language.
The work of the five teachers in the official Refugee Support Service, set up by the Department of Education and Science in 1994, is confined to 202 Vietnamese, Bosnian and Somali children in 71 schools in the Dublin area.
Although this support team aims to provide direct assistance to every newly-arrived refugee pupil of primary age who needs it, the report warns that there are many children who never receive the service "due to the large numbers of children and the disproportionately small number of teachers in the support service".
For example, the INTO considers it "totally unacceptable" that refugee support teachers are being "forced to discriminate" between children whose families have officially-recognised refugee status and other ethnic minority and asylum-seekers' children "who have the same needs and may sometimes be in the same school".
The refugee support teachers are "an excellent resource", the report says, although it is "clear that they are functioning within an ad-hoc system which lacks appropriate funding, procedures, guidelines and consultation".
It urges expansion of the support service and wants resources made available for pupils learning English as a second language; its teachers should, where necessary, have access to qualified bilingual classroom assistants; and maximum class sizes in classes with ethnic minority pupils should be reduced.
The INTO is concerned that the lack of the kind of pre-school "reception process" used in the early 1990s for newly-arrived Bosnian refugee children "can lead to fear and confusion, which compound the linguistic difficulties the children present on entry to school".
It also identifies the continuing isolation of the Vietnamese community as measured by the language problems of its children. While more recently-arrived Bosnian children have learned to converse in English quite fluently on entry to school, "the majority of Vietnamese children known to the service, who are enrolled in junior infant classes, have exceedingly limited - if any - English, even when born in Ireland".
The report also points to the multiple problems experienced by many refugee children: an "overwhelming sense of loss - of family, of home, friends, familiar surroundings, culture, belief and trust in people"; trauma caused by personal experiences of terror and war; anxiety about friends and family left behind; adapting to a new environment unfamiliar both to them and their parents; and interrupted schooling.