Overseas pupils will pay the price of language class cuts
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SCHOOLS are a critical point of contact for children on their arrival in a new country. They can reduce the isolation that many newly arrived people feel.
They can also help to guard against the ghettoisation of newcomers, which has been the source of difficulties in other countries with large immigrant populations.
Thus, teachers and principals are in a powerful position to help determine how overseas students integrate into schools and therefore into the wider society.
But there is no doubt that some schools and some parents are more welcoming than others, as today's tables show.
Schools that are particularly open can then become a magnet for immigrant children, who enroll in large numbers.
This, in turn, can annoy Irish-born parents, who see a lot of time and resources spent on immigrant pupils for whom English is not their first language.
Irish parents are not always united in their welcome for immigrant children in schools. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, has taken a strong stand on this and tried to ensure that Church schools, while maintaining their Catholic ethos, would establish a realistic mix of religious and ethnic make-up more or less in line with the overall mix of the local area.
"I hear of parents -- even those who might fit into the social categorisation of 'good Catholic parents' -- making decisions with their feet, or with their four-wheel-drives, to opt out of diversity in schools," he said last year.
He also admitted that comments he had made about schools, integration and diversity had prompted a number of racist or quasi-racist letters which, he added, did not encourage him.
Others who have made comments about the sudden interest of parents in Gaelscoileanna have also been criticised for suggesting that some, at least, are choosing these schools for their children for reasons other than an interest in Gaeilge.
The figures today show that many Gaelscoileanna have few, if any, non-Irish pupils, for very understandable reasons.
The Department of Education and Science has responded to the growth in the number of non-nationals by a substantial increase in the numbers of EAL (English as an Additional Language) teachers.
In the current school year, about €139m is spent on hiring 2,000 full-time and part-time teachers under the scheme, compared with 1,400 just two years ago. But EAL support is one of the targets for cuts in the autumn, with consequences that are not too hard to work out.
"Children who do not receive adequate language support are unable to participate fully in school life and often become the target for racist comments and exploitation," says the principal of Scoil an Chroi Ro Naofa Iosa, Sean O Diomasaigh, who is furious over the cutbacks in language support.
"To fail to provide adequate and proper EAL staffing reduces the opportunity for dialogue between our international pupils and the language teacher. This will have repercussions not only for our school system, but it will indeed have serious and sinister consequences especially for the Dublin 15 area and for Irish society as a whole," he says.
Local TD Joan Burton agrees that language-learning is vital, and it is the key to successful integration.
"Countries where children hadn't learned English are those that had been the least successful in terms of integration," she rightly points out.
However bad things will be at primary level, they are worse at post-primary, where, according to a recent study, "teachers are struggling to meet the needs of bilingual students in a context of limited training and resources".
It was carried out by a UCD academic who looked underneath what she calls the 'Band-Aid' approach to helping immigrants integrate into Irish school.
Dr Emer Nowlan, from University College, Dublin, looked at language support practices in our post-primary schools.
She concluded that they vary widely and do not reflect international 'best practice'. She is critical of what she regards as the State's 'ad hoc' approach to provision for bilingual students.
A number of worrying factors emerge both from Dr Nowlan's study and other evidence.
The most obvious is that newcomer children are not evenly distributed among schools, but clustered in a small number of them, a pattern already established at primary level, as today's tables show. Another is that language-support teachers have little contact with the parents of their students.
A third feature is the attitude of some teachers who under-emphasise the potential of bilingual students. The real danger is that stereotypes will emerge and become self-fulfilling. This will almost certainly result in lower expectations on the part of both students and teachers.
Fortunately, not all teachers fall into this trap.
Dr Nowlan's study reports examples of very positive responses to the presence of immigrant students. She quotes one very enthusiastic principal in an article in the most recent issue of 'Irish Educational Studies', the journal of the Educational Studies of Ireland. He referred to the "richness" brought by the newcomer students adding, "they do add hunger for learning and ambition".
Cultural and linguistic diversity in schools should not just be 'coped with' but valued for the richness it can bring to the educational experience of all students.
