CHILDREN shouting and scuffing leaves as they make their way across the school playground to line up - a normal enough sight. In Bosnia, however, it is a sight that gladdens the heart but saddens it as well for education has suffered badly during the four years of war.

In a residential school for the blind and partially sighted on the outskirts of Sarajevo, the Esperanto speaking director, Branko Milko, shows me round the building which is being repaired. Small holes cut into boarding still nailed across windows are relics of the time when the school was used by snipers. The brutal graffiti shows that it changed hands more than once.

Now, with international help, including the Irish Refugee Trust, the school is ready to open. Or will be, when the mines are fully cleared and the meadow running down to the river is made safe.

Sarajevo suffered terribly during the siege but other parts of Bosnia were devastated too. Up in the northern town of Velika Kladusa, Nazza is waiting to go to university. She is 21 but lost a year of education when her mother sent her to another town for safety. "I hated it," she says. "I missed my mother and I missed school." Next year she goes to Sarajevo University to study philosophy.

Kadric Rasim was one of Nazza's primary school teachers. Now he is deputy head of the school. When the war was at its height and children from outlying villages were unable to get to school, he travelled to their homes, under fire, to teach them. Arrested four times, he eventually fled up into the hills and joined the locally recruited defence force, fighting with them until his town was liberated. The blue metal crutches leaning against his desk tell the end of that part of the story.

His school operates on a two semester year, running from September to January and from February to July. The 1,200 children on roll - aged seven to 14 - attend on a shift basis, the first starting at 7.30 a.m.

The town represents the many complexities of the Bosnian war. While the population of the country as a whole is roughly divided into Serbs, Croats and Muslim, these labels are crude for many of those in the last category are Muslim in name only and have no allegiance to Islam.

The umbrella term Bosniak is a more accurate term, embracing as it does both believers and non believers. During different stages of the war, Serb, Croat and Bosniak fought against or alongside each other. In Velika Kladusa, neighbour killed neighbour as pitched battles in the street broke out among the Bosniaks themselves. Some were supporters, others opponents, of a local, charismatic but corrupt businessman turned politician who sought to take control of the area. As a result, over 25,000 people were killed, displaced or remain untraced.

The divisions within the town manifested themselves at school. "It's taken us nearly two years to try to help the children," says Rasim, "because they were thinking not with their own minds but with the minds of their parents."

His other concern is text books:

"We have to rewrite them. The previous ones gave us a version of history that was slanted in favour of the Serbs and that meant we have been cut off from parts of our own history."

In the second level school, Croatian course director Nail Miminovich has other problems. "Now that we are looking towards Europe, we have to teach English but first the staff have to learn it and how can they do that without training and books?"

The students are keen to learn English, less so to learn Arabic which is now being taught so that they may study the Koran. This new educational policy is deplored by some parents - they also disagree with compulsory attendance at Islamic studies classes.

"Before the war it was an option," says one mother. "But now my children have to attend, even though we don't read the Koran and have never even been inside a mosque."

KADRIC RASIM points out that if parents wish to withdraw their children from religious teaching classes, they may. However, such as a dissent could be interpreted which claims to be represent all Bosnians and whose Islamic green and white banner is draped over the main co operative in the town.

Opposite it is the mosque, making the links between church and state appear uncomfortably close for many parents.

Meanwhile, Kadric Rasim has work to get on with, children to teach, staff to support. On his desk lies this year's school year book, its pages blank, still waiting to be filled.