Eamonn seemed a perfectly normal pupil when he started secondary school in 2017, and until Christmas of second year too, which is when the sporadic absences started.
I offered the possibility to stay on very casually to all my pupils, but she is the only one who took me up on it – as I was almost certain she would. I don’t always stay myself, naturally, but she feels happy and safe with the door propped open, and I arrange with our caretaker to make sure that it is locked when he is leaving. He doesn’t know the exact circumstances of course, but I bet he could hazard a good guess, and I know that he too is rooting for Kate.
Who cares? And more pertinently, who cares enough to do anything about it? And can anything realistically be achieved in 2020? For the good of everyone in our schools something must happen.The Education Act 1998 requires that everyone living in the State is guaranteed “a level and quality of education appropriate to meeting the needs and abilities of the person”.
Recovery from this is inevitably slow and can only succeed if the circumstances that triggered the decline change, so it is obvious that prevention must be the ultimate goal.