Poverty impacts on a student’s education from a young age, with children from poorer families more likely to be placed in the lowest ability groups for both reading and maths.
This gap between the less well-off and their richer classmates appears to widen as they progress from senior infants to second class. However, this gap is particularly pronounced in the earlier years of primary school, particularly following the pandemic.
Poorer children are also less likely to visit the library, take music, dance, art or swimming lessons, or to play team sports than their richer classmates. Children from more well-off homes are also more likely to agree that they plan to go to college.
The findings are included in the latest round of data published by the ‘Children’s School Lives’ study, a landmark report following 4,000 students through almost 200 primary schools around the country.
It found that children who started school at the onset of the pandemic demonstrate higher levels of worry and anxiety now compared to those who started prior to 2019.
Children in second class in 2023, who would have experienced covid school closures while in junior infants, demonstrate higher levels of worry and anxiety compared to those who attended second class in 2019.
The difference may highlight the impact of wider social change, the report notes, including both the pandemic as well as increases in the cost of living.
The latest report published by researchers at the University College Dublin (UCD) School of Education strongly highlights how poverty impacts on a student’s education from a young age.
The study also found:
- Teachers in non-DEIS schools are more likely to rate children as very teachable than those in DEIS schools;
- Levels of wealth and poverty and being in a DEIS or non-DEIS school did not influence children’s liking of school;
- However, younger children in DEIS schools are more likely to say they are bored across more subjects, especially with reading, writing, Irish and drama.
While social disadvantage is not confined to DEIS schools alone, there is also a greater prevalence of children from minority groups who may need additional educational support in DEIS schools, the study also found.
More than one in five principals of DEIS schools (22%) indicated that 40% of their students are immigrants or from a migrant background or have language proficiency difficulties. For non-DEIS schools, this figure stood at 13%.
The study also found some incidences of more negative interactions between teachers and students in DEIS schools with reference by some children to detentions, parents being contacted and/or threats of suspension from school.
“This signaled also a growing dislike of school, most evident in the narratives of boys,” the study notes.
Teachers and principals in the most socially deprived schools also raised concerns over the impact of drug addiction, food poverty and trauma in what they identified as ‘forgotten’ communities.
One principal of a DEIS school told researchers: “We’d have awful issues with drug abuse in families, and you’re trying to support the parents as well as you can, and you’re seeing the damage that’s being done to the children.”
Homelessness also remained a worry for most schools, across both rural and urban areas. The ‘Children’s School Lives’ study is funded by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA).
The NCCA is currently redeveloping the primary school curriculum and is finalising the specifications. It is aiming to roll out the re-developed curriculum from September 2025. This research is expected to feed into its re-development.
