Mayo school achieves Yellow Flag award for commitment to intercultural inclusion

SAINT Mary’s Secondary School in Ballina has been awarded a Yellow Flag in recognition of its commitment to intercultural inclusion and addressing racism through policies and practises in the school.

The school, which has 479 pupils and 40 teachers, received its recognition at the annual Yellow Flag Programme Awards in Dublin.

The Yellow Flag Programme (YFP) is a practical whole-school initiative, for both primary and post-primary schools, which supports them to become more inclusive of all cultures and ethnicities, celebrate diversity and challenge racism and discrimination.

St. Mary’s joins 149 schools nationwide - reaching approximately 53,000 students and 5,500 teachers.

Teacher at St. Mary’s Denise Feeley described how the programme worked in the school and importance of engagement with parents.

“Regular engagement with parents has been transformative for the school as in some cases parents may feel on their own and their ethnicity/culture undervalued,” she said.

“The school community offers a wider family to those parents and they can form relationships with other parents, not necessarily with parents of their own ethnicity/culture. This helps and promotes more integration into the local community.”

Fifth year student Niamh Kelly described how the YF programme encourages respect and acceptance for everyone regardless of their background: “I believe Yellow Flag has completely shifted my school's atmosphere into one of respect and acceptance. Both students and staff are open towards everyone regardless of background and they also feel comfortable to ask respectful and genuine questions which allows them to widen their world view.

At the start of the school year, we send out a school culture survey so we can have the best view of the backgrounds and cultures in the community. Our school noticeboards and social media display and celebrate national days of the countries in our community in both English and the country's national language along with the country's flag.

“We truly could not have achieved any of this without Yellow Flag and their goal of celebrating diversity, promoting inclusion and challenging racism.”

Speaking at the annual awards, Irish Traveller Movement (ITM) director (which houses the YFP) Bernard Joyce congratulated the whole school community at St. Mary’s.

He highlighted the importance of the programme by referring to a survey launched at the awards which showed that 75% of teachers have no training in dealing with anti-racism or interculturalism in their school environment.

The survey also revealed that many students have witnessed racism within their school, with 43% saying they have witnessed racism once and 32% had witnessed it more than once. Furthermore, 23% of teachers said they had witnessed a racist incident in their school.

Mr. Joyce said the survey findings highlighted the need for mandatory training in all schools: “The ITM is grateful for government investment which the YFP receives. Our survey makes it very clear that continued and greater investment is needed to train and support teachers with specific knowledge and skills for anti-racism and intercultural education. There is a need for mandatory training in all schools.”

This year’s awardees comprised eight primary schools and five post-primary – including 6,300 students and 600 teachers. The survey drew from a large sample of 1,612 pupils and 463 teachers across schools as part of the programme.

Opening the awards ceremony, Special Rapporteur for Racial Equality and Racism Ireland, Dr. Ebun Joseph, said anti-racism should be a compulsory element of the education curriculum in all schools: “Ireland has established a framework and has a commitment to address racism, but the implementation of this remains ‘procedural rather than transformative’ and data collection on racism and ethnicity is insufficient.

“Rising anti-migrant sentiment and far-right activity pose increasing risks to social cohesion. Education and better understanding must start within all schools, both at primary and post primary level. And more broadly, I also recommended mandatory anti-racism training across all of the civil and public service.”