In last week's article I mentioned under-funding of the new Education Welfare Board which is to replace the defunct school attendance officer system. However, even the incomplete implementation of this scheme should have a significant impact on school attendance as by the end of the year there should be almost 100 service delivery staff available, writes Garret Fitzgerald.
But, of course, the monitoring of school attendance and the pursuit of the small minority of neglectful, or in some cases inadequate, parents is only part of what needs to be done to tackle this problem for punitive measures alone will never resolve it.
A complementary approach is the Home/School/Community Liaison Scheme established in 1990, which now involves 278 primary schools as well as 188 post-primary fed by these primary schools.
Measures to involve parents positively in the schooling of their children have been shown to be particularly productive, and the fact that this scheme covers both primary and secondary education makes it very effective.
A third measure designed to ensure that all children get adequate schooling is the Early Start Pre-School Project which, although initiated nine years ago, is still only a pilot project, operating in just 40 schools located in disadvantaged areas of the largest seven cities and towns.
This project is staffed by 56 teachers and by an equal number of childcare workers, with active parental involvement and some involvement also of post-primary students in transition year or in Youthreach or vocational training programmes.
It accommodates 1,680 three- to four-year-old children each year and is currently being reviewed, in conjunction with evidence about similar schemes elsewhere, with a view to widening its application in ways appropriate to the needs of different areas.
Another very useful pilot scheme that should be extended much more widely is that which offers support to teachers in 48 schools, mainly in Dublin and Cork, in behavioural management and in preventing disruptive behaviour by pupils.
Finally there are a number of general schemes designed to assist in a wide variety of different ways schools located in disadvantaged areas:
The Scheme of Assistance to Primary Schools in Designated Areas of Disadvantage, which applies to 314 schools with 68,500 pupils;
The Scheme for Giving Children an Even Break assists in some measure some 2,351 primary schools, 575 of which benefit from preferential teacher provision;
The Breaking the Cycle Scheme, in 32 urban and 120 rural post-primary schools;
The Stay in School Retention Initiative, in 53 schools;
The School Completion Programme in 295 primary and 109 post-primary schools.
And there are also individual projects, like the Rutland Street Project and the remarkable St Joseph's Wind Band Project Ballymun.
Why so many projects? These schemes seem to have accumulated over the years, with each new minister for education adding his own pet projects, and at this stage there must be some overlapping, but also perhaps "underlapping", between them. However, it is not necessarily a bad thing to have tried out a variety of different schemes, and in the light of this experience Noel Dempsey has said he will apply himself to rationalising them.
One must hope that by giving funding priority to this aspect of education he may be able during his term of office to achieve the extension of a comprehensive range of such services to all schools which have disadvantaged students.
He will, I am sure, want to retain an element of flexibility so as to enable different schools in various parts of the country to continue to bring to bear on the problem their special talents and skills.
By chance, last week I had the opportunity to see something of what is being done through the Bridging the Gap scheme in Cork city. In University College Cork I heard a remarkable concert given by children from eight primary schools in disadvantaged areas of Cork city. Each child had started to learn to play an instrument only in the last few months, the schools being given €3,000 for instruments and towards tuition costs.
What was remarkable was that these were not groups or orchestras selected from among the more musically talented pupils in these schools. No, all of the children in each school were involved, none being left out. And every one of the children was clearly deeply engaged with the process, most showing marked signs of enjoying what they were doing. One primary school actually fielded an orchestra of all its 120 children, albeit with a necessarily narrow range of instruments.
I learned that the impact of this musical involvement on school attendance has been dramatic: very few of the pupils fail to turn up on the days when they have training and rehearsals, and school attendance generally seems to have improved.
This year three-quarters of the 32 primary and 10 post-primary schools in disadvantaged areas of Cork have chosen to participate in this Bridging the Gap project, which is under the direction of Prof Aine Hyland, UCC's professor of education, and is managed by Dr Tracey Connolly in that department.
This is a €2 million five-year project for which Prof Hyland first secured £1.5 million finance from philanthropists, which was then supplemented by a five-year grant totalling €500,000 from the Department of Education.
The choice of projects is up to the individual schools. This year's primary school projects include 10 relating to music; six for speech and drama; four involving an after-school club; two for art; two for literacy and numeracy; and two for paired reading involving parents and children working together. Others were for for dance, film-making, and aggression training, and at post-primary level for career development, computer studies and science.
Most of these projects draw generously on skills available among both staff and students at the university, in this way introducing school pupils to its facilities and grounds; an arrangement that makes the idea of eventually going on to third-level much less intimidating for children from disadvantaged areas.
I could see for myself last week how much the young musicians enjoyed wandering around the grounds after their concert. Some of them have been known to come back to picnic there!
This project also involves professional development for principals and teachers, five of whom get scholarships each year for a week at the Harvard School of Education. and there are also research projects, as well as extensive dissemination of research results and good practice.
This Cork initiative is a marvellous example of how much can be achieved by a combination of voluntary effort and quite limited public funding, at this stage just €100,000 a year from the Exchequer.