It's Your Right: Clare Carey - Who are The Aisling Project
Co-ordinator of the Aisling Transition Project, Clare Carey, talks to us about the project and gives us an insight into why it is important for the area to have an initiative targeted to help young people stay in school. She highlights the challenges faced by the young people of Ballymun and what Aisling does to help.
Read all about Clare's Story here
http://www.ballymun.org/dloads/Clare%20Carey%20Story.pdf
The Aisling Transition Project Centre is aimed at young people making the transition from primary school to secondary school. The Aisling Project aims to help make that transition as smooth as possible by providing a safe and fun environment to help the children develop their abilities, and reduce the risk of early school leaving.
For more information on children's rights or the 'It's Your Right' campaign, visit the It's Your right website:
http://itsyourright.ie/
Accompanying Music: 'Mr Magpie' by Ana Gog. http://www.anagogmusic.com/
The Aisling Project, primarily aimed at young people aged 8 to 13, work to prevent early school leaving, benefit the community and advance education by running an after-school intervention project for children at risk. http://www.aislingproject.com/
Transcript below
00:00 - Music
00:05 - Clare: I’m Clare Carey and I’m the coordinator of Aisling Transition Project.
00:08 - Music
00:11 - Clare: The Aisling Project as a whole organisation has five different centres. Four of them are for primary school children in particular and then our project is a separate project for secondary school students so we’re specifically to deal with that transition period from sixth class to first year because, you know, studies are starting to show that not making the successful transfer from sixth class to first year is a factor in early school leaving. So, I suppose as an overall organisation that’s one of the main things we’re looking at is targeting people at risk of early school leaving.
00:43 - Music
00:45 - Clare: We’re in a community that’s a disadvantaged community. Like, it is difficult for any young person in any school to make that transfer over successfully, you know. But doubly, we’re affected and other areas like us, disadvantaged areas, because these would be young people who may have a range of different issues external to school. So, personal issues or family issues that have carried on through generations in their family or you know, it may not be that. Even just living in Ballymun can have an adverse effect on young people and they’re under a lot of pressure around roles, the type of things that they should kind of fall into so, you know, they’re always under these pressures to kind of, to go along with what other people in the community are doing. Not everybody, obviously, but what some people are doing. They kind of feel that kind of pressure and you know, education is often not valued in a community like Ballymun. Not everybody, obviously, but often it’s not valued and the importance of school is not really seen. So yeah, it’s doubly important then for our young people to make that transfer into secondary school successfully, see the importance of education and continue on in education.
01:58 - Music
02:00 - Clare: A typical day, it’s kind of broken into three parts. So they come in and they have a snack and they do their homework. So that’s the first hour and then the second hour they’ll do an activity. So that could be sport, rap, dance, cooking. They might do various programmes based on hygiene or whatever, different sorts of games and things like that so that’s usually for an hour and then also the homework, it has to take up a full hour of the day as well. And then the last hour is the dinner. So that’s roughly the breakdown of the day.
02:32 - Clare: It’s those sort of things. You know, there is a difference, there would be some young people who, I could guarantee you, would be wandering around the street, start to get themselves in trouble and start hanging around with the wrong sort of people and then sure that’s kind of leading them down a path then for a lot of their life. I could 100% say that, there are specific young people that without being here until 7 o’ clock every evening would be getting themselves into serious trouble.
03:02 - Music
03:03 - Clare: The structure to them is massively important because sometimes their lives can become quite chaotic and they don’t have structure outside of here. But, coming here and having that part of their day is important.
03:15 - Music. Fade out.
03:35 - END