According to a new shocking report from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) brought out yesterday, a staggering ONE IN EIGHT families sending their children to particular primary schools are homeless.
According to the ESRI report, our growing homelessness crisis is being felt and seen first hand at at number of schools, predominantly in urban areas. One primary school principal told the ESRI that they had pupils “who were moving literally from family-to-family, with their own family, due to homeless, and sleeping in a car, coming from a van… and they own nothing.”
Another principal, also in an urban area, said 12pc – one in eight – of families with children in the school were homeless.
The report details how the recession has hit the living conditions of children in attending schools in the Department of Education DEIS programme for disadvantaged communities, and their families, very hard.
The impact of homelessness on young pupils is one of the issues highlighted in the ESRI review of the School Completion Programme (SCP), which provides supports for children and young people at risk of early school leaving.
The SCP supports about 36,000 pupils within the school system, and about 800 young people who are out of schools. But while report states that the deteriorating economic circumstances of families is likely to have impacted on their need for support, funding for the SCP has been cut by one third in recent years.
Gordon Jeyes, chief executive of the child and family agency, welcomed the ESRI report, saying it highlighted an excellent practice being implemented under SCP, but that the programme lacked coherence and strong governance.
“Reform of the programme is overdue.”
Jeyes explains how it in 2009 was agreed that an integrated approach to educational welfare should be adopted; which would involve closer links between home school community liaison, school completion and educational welfare.
“Each of these strands is now under Tusla’s remit and for the first time, we are in a position to incorporate educational welfare into the child welfare system.”
Are you as shocked by these figures as we are? Are there children in your local schools affected by the homelessness crisis? Send me an e-mail at Trine.Jensen@HerFamily.ie.
