System let me down: Londonderry mother

SDLP MLA Mary Bradley told a meeting of the Stormont Education Committee how she felt depressed after a visit to a nursery school in Londonderry due to the lack of resources available.

Educationalists from the Department of Education had been summoned to provide evidence to the Committee on Policy Interventions for Successful Secondary Schools but Mrs Bradley argued intervention was necessary at a much earlier stage.

She described how one mother felt she was being failed by the system stating: "That woman is trying as hard as she can to get the help that her children need, through no fault of the school.

"The school is running the nurture centre now at its own expense, but there will be no nurture centre because the school can no longer sustain it. We talk about improving life for children, but surely that is the stage of life that we need to improve.

"They should not have to go to primary school, and leave primary school and move further up in their education to other schools, and then the other schools are looking for money to try to improve their lives. There is no sense in it at all.

"If we do not start with them when they are that age, we are just wasting money as the children are going through the school, and we are still not helping those children. I felt deeply, deeply sorry for that mother. I came out of the school very depressed.

"There was also a young father there with a child who cannot get the full attention that it needs to make its way in life. It is just so depressing when you go out into communities.

"Some of those schools are in highly deprived communities. Those are not the sort of parents who have the money to keep funding a school; they just do not have it. They would have to choose between feeding their children and giving it to the school. It is just not fair the way the system is. That young mother felt that the education system had let her children down."

Dr Robin Davison from the Department of Education replied: "One can only share your disappointment and unease. What we are trying to do at a broad level through the early years and special educational needs work is to put in place a system that will enable us to do that.

"I could wax lyrical about the attempt to bring consistency of approach to those issues across the Province, instead of having to deal with them in separate ways.

"On the specifics of nurture groups, there is a discussion to be had on how to transfer pilot work into a coherent delivery to all the schools that need it. The nurture groups are in a small number of schools, whereas, Mary, you know as well as I do, that the need in that area is much broader than just the small number of schools with nurture groups.

"Therefore it is a question of finding limited resource to develop a validated approach across the full range of schools that require it. That is the conundrum."