Statement by Jim Allister MLA:
“During an assembly debate on Nurture provision within primary schools I welcomed the positive impact they are having within the schools that currently have them.
“In particular it is worth highlighting and commending Harryville Primary School for their recent Boxall award for nurture. This is a credit to the staff, pupils and parents who are engaging in such a positive manner with the programme. Nurture is designed to help children who are having difficulty settling into a school environment to make it more enjoyable so they can benefit fully from education.
“In the course of my contribution I encouraged the Minister to put nurture on a more secure financial footing and then to further develop it so the many positive outcomes are available to more schools.”
Note to Editor:
Jim Allister MLA contribution to the debate:
Mr Allister: Unaccustomed as I am to commending government projects, I have to say that my experience of the nurture project is very positive.
I think that it has been most successful, where it has been allowed to operate, in reaching out to those in greatest need.
In my constituency, we sadly only have one nurture project, at Harryville Primary School. We have some adjacent ones. There is a very successful one at Ballycraigy Primary School, and there is quite a good one at Harpur’s Hill in Coleraine. It seems that these projects have been successful in inducing in the kids better behaviour, more interest in school — some may be coming from a background where that is not overly encouraged — and, indeed, interest in the joys of education through improving their reading capacity and all those things. So the pilot schemes that have taken place, from what I hear of them, appear to have been quite good. I am relying almost more on the anecdotal evidence that I hear from my constituents than on the very positive report from Queen’s University.
One of the criticisms — it is not to do with the delivery of the project and those who deliver it — is to do with the drip feed nature of the funding. It was delivered under Delivering Social Change. The Department of Education was just the conduit for passing on the money, meaning it had to wait for the release of the money from OFMDFM, as it then was, and then it passed it on. That drip feed is the core problem with going forward with the project and putting it on a stable footing. We are not talking about a lot of money. When you think that the commitment to each nurture unit was of the order of £70,000, and that multiples of that are often spent with little apparent effect, it seems to be giving a good return for the spend. It is not that hard to establish it. It obviously needs a room kitted out, a teacher and probably a classroom assistant but, after that, its demands are relatively modest. Therefore, I would be very supportive of the idea of expanding that provision within the mainstream. That can only be positive.
One of the most distressing and saddening things for anyone who has any relationship with education is to see kids pass through the system, knowing that they are not taking the best out of it, maybe not being encouraged from home and elsewhere to take the best out of it, and not achieving their full potential — in fact, becoming alienated from the education system, whereas education should be the door to the world for all of us. It is by going through that Tuesday 15 November 2016 56 door and experiencing it that we move on to greater things and make a really worthwhile contribution to society. Trying to capture a sector of our kids who are lagging behind can only be a good thing. Therefore, I encourage the Minister to be bold in advancing the scheme and mainstreaming the funding so that it has certainty and can progress to attain the ends in even greater form to what it has already attained.
Full transcript can be found here: http://aims.niassembly.gov.uk/officialreport/report.aspx?&eveDate=2016/11/15&docID=280816