Concern as lockdown sees rise in school drop-outs
WLD SEEING INCREASE NUMBER OF STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO COPE WITH REMOTE LEARNING
FOLLOWING the closure of schools across the county, students are facing into weeks and potentially months of remote learning, of severe inconvenience as they prepare for exams and end of year assessments.
For some this will simply mean retiring to their bedrooms, logging on to their school’s system via a laptop or tablet, and using high-speed broadband to keep up with the latest communications from teachers and classmates.
Yet for others this closure, this lockdown, threatens their very future in second-level education and may even see them abandon their studies altogether.
Marie Louise Byrne is a Community Development Coordinator with Wexford Local Development ( WLD) and is also a mother of four sons, one of whom did his Leaving Cert last year. She has witnessed the impact of lockdown from both sides of the coin, in both a professional and personal sense.
‘We work with four children in the Direct Provision Centre in Courtown who are doing their Leaving Cert this year,’ Marie Louise says. ‘ They are really high achievers with so much ambition who are devastated by the current situation
‘ To students in Direct Provision, education is paramount. They put a lot into it, they’re very diligent, and this situation is breaking their hearts. The value of education to them and their future is huge.’
Maeve O’Byrne is Education & Life Long Learning Coordinator with WLD and she says the impact of lockdown on these students and others in disadvantaged households is huge.
‘ The students from the Direct Provision Centre want to be in class but the fear for them is bringing the virus back to the centre, they’re all in one bubble there.
‘But we have tailored programmes for them and we’ve organised space for them to work in. The reality is they’re not on a level playing field, so we’re trying to find ways to help them keep achieving their potential.’
To help level that playing field and ensure these students achieve their potential, Maeve, Marie Louise and the rest of the WLD team provide the students in Direct Provision with laptops and other devices, and allocate them study areas in a centre where space is often at a premium.
But it’s not just students in Direct Provision who are impacted by the schools’ closure.
‘We have a client support team which is in contact with all the secondary schools across Wexford,’ Maeve explains. ‘ They reach out to parents and families who might be having difficulties with practical stuff like access to hardware.
‘We deal with members of the travelling community who find home schooling difficult, those parents are very conscious and very concerned that their children are going to fall behind because they’re not in class.
‘ This is having a greater impact on them, they need to have that structure. We also find that new communities, refugees, are struggling; the children might not be practising the language, falling back into their own language, and the parents find it difficult to communicate with the schools because of the language barrier.’
In an effort to address this, to bridge those gaps, WLD organises online homework clubs for these students, offers online and phone support to parents
and children, and provides training on how to use software like MS Teams and classroom app, Seesaw. It even runs online webinars for parents on how to deal with and understand anxiety in children.
Yet, despite all this, Marie Louise says the loss of this structure has led to an increase in the rate of drop-outs, with a number of students opting not to return to school after the lockdown ended.
‘Last year we found there was a big drop-off rate in students after the first lockdown, in households where there wouldn’t have been a tradition of learning and the students didn’t have access to remote learning materials,’ she says.
‘ The key thing is motivation, everyone is struggling, and if parents haven’t got the time to do it, they can’t do it. Students become disconnected with the culture of learning.’
Both Marie Louise and Maeve are parents to second-level students themselves, and their own children have faced challenges too,
‘ The worst thing has been the constant change and the uncertainty,’ says Marie Louise. ‘My son would have done his mocks in February and within a month it was all closed down.
The exams would have suited him better, but it was the lack of decision-making and the moving of the goalposts which made it hard.
‘He ended up with zero motivation, it would have been a disaster if he’d done his exams.’
Thankfully Marie Louise’s son got the points he needed and is now ‘flying it’ at DCU, at least in a virtual sense.
‘He’s studying in DCU now and he’s doing really well – although he hasn’t left Wexford yet. But it’s cheaper for me because I don’t have to worry about finding accommodation for him in Dublin.’
With another son currently in Fifth Year, Marie Louise will soon find herself back in the Leaving Cert cycle once more. Maeve, meanwhile, is mother to a 14-year-old daughter and has first-hand experience of an issue which is affecting many of WLD’s service users.
‘Last year we had an issue which a lot of people shared, we live in rural Wexford so had to deal with very bad broadband,’ she says. ‘It reached the point where she couldn’t do her work anymore and we had to just call a halt to it. But we’ve since changed providers, got her a tablet and her own space to work in.’