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Background

Through our work we see the daily lived experience of educational disadvantage on children and families and how despite education being the route out of poverty, these children are trapped into the intergenerational cycle of poverty due to insufficient supports and resources to help them get the education they need to ensure their better future. We wanted to highlight the severity of educational disadvantage and influence policy reform in this area.

Campaign dates 

Sping 2006

What we did

• Analysed Government's progress in tackling educational disadvantage to date and made key recommendations to improve the educational outcomes for children living in disadvantage
• Sought support from like-minded organisations such as teachers unions, parents councils, other relevant NGO's
• Met all opposition political parties to seek their support and get our recommendations adopted into their manifestos
• Attended all teachers union's conferences to get their direct support for our postcard campaign
• Lauched 'Make the Grade' report and widely disseminated it

 So what happened?

• Government had introduced in 2006 its Delivery Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS) strategy to tackle educational disadvantage. This strategy comprises different components that schools can avail of depending on their level of disadvantage. We are continuously monitoring the roll out of this strategy
• 2007 - Some of our recommendations were adopted as Government policy including increasing the allocation of language support teachers to schools and promising to reduce class sizes
• 2007/8  - Educational Disadvantage continues to remain a key priority for us and formed part of our recommendations in the Children's Manisfesto and Children's Budgets
• 2009 - The Make the Grade Campaign fed into the development of Written Out, Written Off Campaign and hopefully some of the unmet recommendations will be advanced through this campaign

Useful Documents 

Barnardos Government must do better to make the grade... policy document is available to download here.

Written Out, Written Off report click here to download a copy. 

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