Editorial

2022 marks the centenary of the emergence of an independent Irish state and thus an appropriate time to reflect on what a century of independence has meant for our education system. A number of milestones have been reached along the way, not least the introduction of free post-primary education in 1967, a gamechanger in respect of access to education (Harford 2018). According to Lee (2018, ix),

the initiative opened up unprecedented opportunities for further education beyond primary school to generations hitherto condemned to an educational system that equipped the vast majority of the population for an existence as only hewers of wood and drawers of water at home, and often not all that much better abroad for many first-generation emigrants.

However, while participation rates in second and third-level education increased dramatically in the subsequent decades, barriers to participation for those from socio-economically and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds have remained and educational expansion, while raising the national standards of education, has not led to any meaningful reduction in social-class inequalities (Lynch and Crean 2018). Indeed, there is significant evidence to suggest that a process of accelerated disadvantage has been heightened by the advent of hegemonic neoliberal ideals in which schools have become acutely classed spaces shaped by market ideologies (Cahill and Hall 2014).

This special issue brings together scholars, both national and international, in the field of education, with a view to examining how the education system operates and who it serves, why intractable educational inequalities persist and what can be done to affect meaningful change. It charts the lived reality of educational disadvantage, interrogating the complex, multi-layered and self-perpetuating nature of inequality as well as the ways in which the education system has propagated and legitimated inequalities, reproducing intergenerational advantages for dominant social groups.

While acknowledging the way in which the use of the term educational disadvantage can disempower and objectify, contributing and legitimating the construction of deficited cultural models (Cahill 2015), we nonetheless consciously and critically employ this term both because it is the term used in the Education Act of 1998 but also because it names the issue rather than euphemistically alluding to it. The Education Act defines educational disadvantage as ‘the impediments to education arising from social or economic disadvantage which prevent students from deriving appropriate benefit from education in schools’ (s. 32.b.9.). One of the objectives stated in the legislation is ‘to promote equality of access to and participation in education and to promote the means whereby students may benefit from education’ (s.6.c.). At the same time, we acknowledge the contested, problematic nature of the term regularly used in order to re-frame and re-present inequalities as issues that pertain to the individual, an individual school or school type, and a particular community setting (Ball 2008). This practice feeds a political and public policy narrative in which the ‘problem’ is located elsewhere, in the ‘disadvantaged school’, the ‘disadvantaged community’ and the disadvantaged ‘student’.

This special issue commences with a compelling and cogent foreword by Paul Reville, in which he issues a clarion call to policy makers to take action now on the issue of educational disadvantage. Reflecting on the issue in both the Irish and US context, Reville posits that neither democracy has demonstrated the political will to create conditions of living and schooling that are prerequisite to genuine and sustainable equality of opportunity. Schools, he submits, tend to ‘reflect the strengths, weaknesses and inequities of the surrounding society’ rather than creating them. Inattention to children’s life circumstances, needs and the effects of poverty, compounded by the under-resourcing of education, has thwarted our collective ambitions to achieve bold, national, equity goals.

Reay, also looking at the issue of socially just educational systems from an international perspective, echoes many of Reville’s concerns, at the same time identifying policies that enable greater educational equality. The cautionary tale for Ireland, Reay concludes, ‘is that educational systems underpinned by neoliberal values of competition, efficiency, free choice, flexibility and regular testing, endorsed and promoted by global institutions such as the OECD, neither enable high education quality nor promote equality’.

The subsequent two articles trace the genesis of policy in relation to educational disadvantage across the island of Ireland. In ‘Reflecting on 100 Years of Educational Policy in Ireland: Was Equality ever a Priority?’ Fleming, Harford and Hyland look back at one hundred years of education policy through an equality lens asking whether or not the state has delivered on promises made and whether or not commitments to fostering equality at key junctures have been realised. Ultimately, the authors conclude that despite the incremental and sophisticated evolution of policy, achieving equality has not been to the forefront of policymaking in Irish education since the State was founded, with the exception of a brief period during the 1960s. In ‘Addressing Educational Disadvantage in Northern Ireland 1921–2021: A History of Squandered Opportunities?’, Purdy employs a Foucauldian genealogical theoretical framework to present a critical reflection on efforts to address educational disadvantage in Northern Ireland. Echoing the previous article, Purdy argues that historically, addressing education disadvantage has not been a key policy priority for successive governments in Northern Ireland, whose attention has instead too often focused on politicised power struggles around the control and management of schools in a divided community. ‘Making a Difference in Educational Inequality: Reflections from Research and Practice’, by Cahill and O’ Sullivan is a reflective, research-informed, commentary on educational disadvantage. The article problematises the concept of educational disadvantage before proceeding to explore possibilities for changing paradigms of policy and practice in marginalised school settings. Arguing that research and writing on educational disadvantage in Ireland has focused largely upon policy, statistics, and the problems that accompany marginalisation, the authors explore possibilities for change at the level of policy and practice, considering interventions in terms of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

The remaining articles have a more empirical focus looking at the lived reality of educational disadvantage. McAvinue turns the spotlight on the effect of neighbourhood factors, employing data from the Growing Up in Ireland survey to explore whether the SES of the neighbourhood within which a student lives makes a significant contribution to the prediction of academic achievement over and above the SES of the family and school. Her findings support an understanding of educational disadvantage as a phenomenon that is perpetuated within multiple social contexts and suggest that strategies to tackle educational disadvantage should take a pan-contextual perspective. A similar focus is applied in the subsequent article by Fenwick, Kinsella and Harford which is based on data gathered at the initial stages of a major research project, entitled Power to Progress. An initiative to enhance academic performance, encourage school retention and broaden the educational and occupational aspirations of students in senior cycle in DEIS (delivering equality of opportunity in schools) schools which serve economically disadvantaged communities, this article reports on the impact of the programme on students’ sense of belonging in school, self-efficacy and career aspirations. The article presents an important, and possibly the first, profile of senior cycle students from DEIS schools who have demonstrated academic resilience in terms of school retention, career ambition, and availing of additional support in their schools through this intervention project. In ‘Explicating Pedagogic Communication in Classroom Practice’, Nolan and MacRuairc focus directly on classroom practice and explicate patterns of pedagogic communication that are not conducive to quality learning or engaging student interactions. They argue that in many DEIS contexts, patterns of student engagement reveal a pedagogic discourse where the instructional is dominated by a strongly framed regulative discourse. The authors advocate for a direct reversal of the relationship between the instructional and the regulative as has happened in some alternative education settings where innovation in teaching and learning with highly relevant curriculum content is the focus of school experience. Again focussing on DEIS post-primary schooling, McGinley and Keane examine how an intercultural approach to education is enacted in an urban DEIS post-primary setting with a particular focus on Traveller and non-Traveller minority ethnic students. The article zones in on participants’ constructions of ‘normality’ with regard to how people ‘look’ and behave, and of students’ experiences of peer relationships, including inter-ethnic conflict. Findings are interrogated within the context of critical race, feminist and class theories, as well as the prevailing discourse around educational disadvantage. Moving on to post-school pathways, Carroll, Ye and McCoy examine the educational trajectories at 20 of children identified with disabilities in the mid-primary years. Again employing GUI data, they draw on effectively maintained inequality to understand the dynamics of inequality for disabled young people from different social backgrounds. The evidence, they conclude, reveals the myriad challenges faced by disabled young people in Ireland, in particular reflecting the direct and indirect impact of socio-economic disadvantage, at family, school and community levels, raising important implications for inclusive education and policy addressing education disadvantage. The issue concludes with a paper by O’Donoghue and Clarke which details the results of a long-running research project on school leadership by school principals, deputy principals, and local school-board members in post-conflict contexts, extremely remote developing world contexts, and disadvantaged post-communist societies.

The orthodoxy within political and policy circles both in Ireland and internationally is to pledge a commitment to social justice and a drive to realise this objective through the education system. What the articles in this special issue illustrate, however, is that this social justice narrative runs alongside, and often in collision with, a neoliberal agenda, in which targets and metrics reign supreme over experience and well-being. Policy initiatives and windows of opportunity have arisen at various junctures, but these have tended to arise as a response to global trends and the neo-liberal agenda of organisations such as the OECD (Gleeson and Ó Donnabháin 2009; Malone and Hogan 2020). Despite the accentuation of policy in the area of educational disadvantage in the Irish context, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the system continues to foster and legitimate inequality, reproducing intergenerational advantages for dominant social groups. Moreover, educational disadvantage continues to be viewed as a school-based issue, with a lack of recognition and response at a policy level of its fundamental, deep-seated relationship with wider economic inequalities across Irish society (Fleming and Harford 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judith Harford

Judith Harford is Professor of Education at the School of Education, UCD. Her research area is history of education with a particular focus on gender and social class. Her books include The Opening of University Education to Women in Ireland (Irish Academic Press, 2008); Secondary School Education in Ireland: History, Memories and Life Stories, 1922–67 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); A Cultural History of Education in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Piety and Privilege: Catholic Secondary Schooling in Ireland and the Theocratic State, 1922–67 (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Áine Hyland

Áine Hyland is Emeritus Professor of Education at University College Cork and former vice-president of the university. She has been involved in teacher education since the 1970s and has published widely on educational policy, inclusive education and history of Irish education. She chaired a number of government committees including the Commission on the Points system and the (statutory) Education Disadvantage Committee. Although retired from University College for over 15 years she continues to be involved in educational research and is a passionate advocate for inclusive education. A recipient of several honorary doctorates in recognition of her contribution to Irish education, she has been a Member of the Royal Irish Academy since 2018.

Brian Fleming

Brian Fleming is a retired post-primary school principal and now works as a writer, an independent researcher, consultant and commentator. He served for twenty-five years as Principal of Collinstown Park Community College, a large school located in the Dublin suburb of Clondalkin. Over the years, Brian has contributed articles to the national newspapers, and other publications. In the main these addressed aspects of the history of the Irish educational system and how it responds to the needs of today's generation of economically deprived children and young people. He has recently completed a detailed study of the operation of the DEIS (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools) programme which has been published as The Lived Reality of Educational Disadvantage.

His other books include:

The Vatican Pimpernel: the wartime exploits of Msgr. Hugh O' Flaherty. Irish Education 1922-2007: Cherishing All The Children? County Dublin VEC, 1930-2013: Responding to need. Irish Education and Catholic Emancipation, 1791-1831: The Campaigns of Bishop Doyle and Daniel O' Connell. Heroes in the Shadows: Humanitarian Action and Courage in the Second World War.