“I am a dad-of-three girls, all still at school, all facing different challenges within the school environment. I get the pressure, being a parent and wanting to make sure your children are happy at school”
The Minister for Education has set a launch date for a new Northern Ireland curriculum to help children with anxiety stay engaged in school. The huge upheaval from early years to post-primary is due to be published by September 2026 after a review found the current system “not fit for purpose”. The move comes as worried parents, teachers’ union NASUWT, the Children’s Law Centre and a South Down MLA recently raised their concerns to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) on an “epidemic of school absence” in Northern Ireland.
READ MORE: ‘School made me cry, shake and struggle to breathe’- more support is neededREAD MORE: Co Down parents say sending their kids to school ‘like entering a burning building’
Addressing the concerns raised, MLA Paul Givan (DUP) spoke to the LDRS from his Stormont office this week, saying:”Obviously EBSNA is now recognised as a growing challenge and that is something that is coming through from both parents and the teaching profession. “On a human level, I am a dad-of-three girls, all still at school, all facing different challenges within the school environment. “I get the pressure, being a parent and wanting to make sure your children are happy at school, and whenever they are not, that creates a dynamic of anxiety for you as a parent also. “I know, there are some parents having to deal with issues I have not had to, and so I recognise that there is real difficulty there for them. And I accept that is very real. “I absolutely understand, I have their back in terms of wanting to make changes, but we also need a whole collective responsibility across the education system to enable us to be effective in meeting the needs of our local communities “But, it can’t just be an MLA or people saying the Minister of Education has a silver bullet to fix everything. I can lead an education system, but that system is made up of many different parts, people and organisations and including other political parties, collectively we need to play our part in a plan for change. If that can be achieved the benefit will be for those parents and pupils.”
For the first time, the Education Authority (EA) has provided a unique absence code for this school term, to be used by parents and schools to record Emotional-Based School Non-Attendance (EBSNA). However, there are concerns from the Children’s Law Centre that the code to record the “epedemic of school absence” is not supported by any follow-up service at this time.
Minister Givan responded: “The reason for the new absence code is to allow us to record more accurately the reasons for a child or young person not being in attendance. That also helps to validate that there is a real issue when it comes to EBSNA. “We need to be able to unpack why there is that particular non-attendance. “If we can identify that, it will allow resources to go into that school if there is a prevalence of EBSNA. If we don’t have that data then it is hard to make sure you are effectively targeting those resources that are available. “The data will be very much there to help us align the resources to those who need it.”
Co Down parents told the LDRS their children are now being home schooled to “protect their mental health”. Many of the children are waiting “unacceptable” times over the 26 week window for an educational psychologist on a neurodiverse assessment of autism and ADHD.
The parents said they had de-registered their child from the classroom as putting their kids to school was like “telling them to go into a burning building”. The Education Minister has now pledged to increase the provision of psychologists to address long waiting times for assessment, with a wider plan to “transform special education needs (SEN)”. The Minister said:”It is not acceptable the length of time when it comes to accessing the psychology services. I am told they will do assessments on a priority for those who need urgent immediate assessment. “Often a parent or school will know or have a fair idea that a child needs additional support at the point a referral is made, which is supposed to take no longer than 26 weeks. “But only about half of cases are being assessed within that window, so there are far too many taking longer than that.”
He added:”We are investing in the number of psychologists available in order to increase the capacity for that. We are also introducing local impact teams to have health workers who are also available to try to help young people. But there is a need for a wider plan to transform special education needs (SEN). “We have to be able to meet the needs much earlier. That is part of the work we are trying to do to give schools that extra support so that they are enabled to provide that additional need without having to go through this process. “We have secured a very limited amount of funding through the Executive, but if we are serious about significant transformation we need to have much more funding coming into the department to allow me to do that.”
NI’s biggest teachers union, NASUWT told the LDRS that it would support a NI wide system of online resources for EBSNA children. The DUP assembly member has confirmed that alternative environments for education are now being researched. He said:”We did publish our Attendance Matters guidance last year and in the next number of weeks I intend to go out on a wider consultation on a new attendance strategy that we will publish. That will be about how we will look at driving up attendance and addressing issues around attendance. “When you get to the point of de-registering and there have been a number already this academic year, that has to be an absolute last resort. And I have no doubt that such parents have exhausted every possible avenue to try to have their child stay at school. I just appeal to parents that we do engage with the school and allow the welfare officer and psychologist to do their work to see if they can overcome the issues. “Ultimately parental rights allow them to make the choice to de-register and opt for home schooling, there are other opportunities that we are trying to identify. “We have commissioned research into alternative models of education, that may also be online learning. We are funding that through the Raise programme. Community based type models and online to give us a bit more evidence on other alternatives to traditional education. “We need to see what other alternatives there are to traditional school settings that are ultimately not working for some young people, that will be in some very small cases, but nevertheless it’s about how we can support them.”
South Down MLA Cathy Mason ( Sinn Fein ) has told the Minister to move “Heaven and Earth” to make changes to an education system failing children experiencing EBSNA. In March, the Minister launched a new strategy, ‘TransformED’ to reform education delivery in NI with a wide ranging pathway set out for school term 2026/27. He said: “There has been a strategic review by Lucy Crehan ( education consultant) done on the NI curriculum that indicated it wasn’t fit for purpose and made a whole series of recommendations. “One recommendation was that we are trying to cover too many issues within one particular subject and that means you are not bringing every child along in terms of their understanding and they get left behind and that can have an impact on anxiety. “We need to go less content, but allow more time to develop deeper understanding that every child can move forward with. Part of our weakness in NI is that the curriculum has not served us well.
The Education Minister added: “So, there is a curriculum task force that we have set up and we are in the process of appointing for every single subject in NI from early years, primary school and post primary, there will be a subject lead around that and this time 12 months (Sept 2026) from now we will have a new curriculum. That will take a number of years to implement, but the work of reforming the entire curriculum will help more children to stay engaged in school. “It can take time, but I have a degree of urgency on it, because if it is your child you don’t want the Minister saying give me 10 years and I think I will have this sorted, well by then it is too late. “So what are we doing right now to help and support? There is a long term plan for teacher professional development, enhancing the provision to support our schools which we will be investing in. “The benefits will take some time to see, but there is real work happening. “I certainly can understand some people saying the education system is broken, it certainly wasn’t performing the way it should be. “One of the things I certainly detected early on coming into office, almost a bit of despair that the system doesn’t work and no clear plan on how it was going to be addressed. “We are now already seeing some improvements and hopefully it will give some people hope. “We need to give people actual real meaningful impact in terms of helping them and give them hope that things will get better and improve our education system and I believe we are doing that. But, we still need to see that manifest itself tangibly for children and parents to see change in our education system.”
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