Social entrepreneurs are doing their bit for education in myriad ways. This year, for example, The Shona Project will deliver its Survival Handbook for Girls to youngsters starting secondary school. It is packed with content about things like making new friends, mental health, staying positive, managing the online world and self-care, which schools can use as part of their induction process.
Named after founder Tammy Darcy’s much loved big sister Shona, who sadly died last year, the social enterprise also runs powerful and engaging school workshops focused on kindness, mindset, resilience and confidence, helping to provide a dose of big sister savvy to girls navigating their teenage years.
Learning difficulties are another challenge for many school goers. Dyslexia alone affects around one-in-10.
Having successfully worked with children with dyslexia for decades, specialist tutor Mary Moran has scaled up her activities so that parents and teachers can deliver her programme too. “I just didn’t want any parent to call me distraught and in tears, and have to say ‘Sorry, I can’t help you’,” she explains.
For social entrepreneurs Pádraic Hogan and David Neville, the inspiration for their enterprise, jumpAgrade, came from the inequity of the current grinds culture. They found that about half of all Leaving Certificate students receive grinds, and the majority of those who do come from more affluent backgrounds, which has a knock-on impact on progression rates to third level.
So they set about helping to bridge the gap by making top quality tutoring and feedback available to second-level students, regardless of location, ability or socio-economic background.
To date, jumpAgrade has provided online academic and wellbeing support to more than 2,600 underserved students in secondary schools across Ireland, all free thanks to its donors and sponsors.
“By harnessing technology and a network of dedicated tutors, jumpAgrade is helping to level the playing field for students who need it most, striving to ensure that every young person has the opportunity to thrive in career, life and society,” says Joan Connolly, its chief executive.
The Shona Project
Tammy Darcy founded her award-winning social enterprise, The Shona Project, in 2016, with the aim of educating and empowering young women to become more resilient.
The need was stark. According to its research, only 20 per cent of teenage girls feel as though they will have the same opportunities as boys. Almost 60 per cent say they have worries or anxieties that nobody knows about. Ninety per cent have negative thoughts about themselves.
“Our mission is to educate, empower and inspire today’s girls of Ireland to be tomorrow’s strong, confident and curious young women,” Darcy says.
It is a mission delivered in numerous ways, including schools workshops, its Shine Festival which features talks by inspiring women, its online community, and its mentorship and ambassador programmes.
To date The Shona Project has worked with more than 100,000 girls. Its Survival Handbook for Girls is delivered free to first-year girls each September.
Darcy’s background is in third-level education but the idea for The Shona Project came from the sports field, when she volunteered as a local club soccer coach for boys and girls.
“I just saw the difference in how girls and boys move through the world, and how they’re influenced by the challenges that they have. For so many of the girls that I was coaching and involved with, that one hour of training a week for many of them was the only time they were getting any positive feedback, the only time they had access to role models,” explains Darcy.
“I noticed the challenges too, that they were so hard on themselves and that the expectations that were on them were so high.”
The organisation works alongside the education sector in numerous ways. For example, it has more than 160 interviews with inspirational women on its Shine Festival website, tied directly to learning outcomes of the school curriculum, which teachers can use as a resource for subjects such as SPHE.
When it comes to school workshops, there is enormous value in bringing in an outside person to work on topics such as bullying, or anxiety, or relationships.
“Teachers have to maintain a boundary, whereas we are able to go in and share personal stories and hold space for discussions that perhaps the teachers are not able to, so we complement each other,” explains Darcy.
DCode Dyslexia
Mary Moran has been tutoring children with dyslexia for 40 years. Such has been the demand for her services in recent years that she decided to put all her knowledge into a programme to help the growing number of children she simply could not manage face-to-face.
It was that desire to, quite literally, leave no child behind that led to DCode Dyslexia, an effective reading programme that parents can use at home to help their child which is simple to teach and fun to engage with.
Moran was already deep into developing the programme when she realised that what she had also developed was a social enterprise. That only happened when she came across the webpage for Social Entrepreneurs Ireland (SEI) one night while scrolling on her phone. Until that point, “I didn’t even know what a social entrepreneur was,” she says.
Today, as well as her literacy programme, she has also gone on to write and publish a series of beautifully illustrated story books, each designed to encourage children to enjoy reading.
“It is assumed that reading is a task that is easy, whereas in fact, there is no equipment in our brains that was designed for reading. Only about 25 per cent of children who start school learn to read easily. There is also an assumption that if you read enough with kids, and expose them to enough books – they’ll read. And that’s not actually true,” she says.
“My programme is one of structured literacy. It starts by giving them the skills, like Lego bricks of sounds, to teach them how to put them together.”
Moran, who is in her mid-60s, understands the pressures schools and teachers are under, and the challenges schools face overall. It’s why she is also working with teachers, passing on her knowledge so that they can teach her programme too.
“There are still too many kids leaving school unable to read and it’s devastating. So until all of the teachers in all of the schools know how to teach kids to read properly, the job won’t be done,” she says.
jumpAgrade
JumpAgrade pairs students with a vetted tutor who provides weekly online personalised feedback. Its custom technology helps track students’ confidence and grades throughout their education journey.
“Social Entrepreneurs Ireland played matchmaker for my relationship with jumpAgrade,” says Joan Connolly, its recently appointed chief executive.
“A few years ago, the founders of jumpAgrade were one of the awardees on an SEI programme that I was leading. I fell in love with its mission. As a first-generation university student with a longish career in higher education and a shortish fuse for the ‘this is the way it’s always been done’ culture, I was delighted to be invited to join their board a few years ago, and more so, to become their new CEO earlier this year,” she explains.
Its mission to level the education playing field matters enormously, given that students from affluent backgrounds are up to 14-times more likely to progress to university compared to their less privileged students.
“A two-tier education system exists in Ireland, with access to additional supports such as fee-paying schools and private tuition beyond the reach of many. Of the 60,000-plus students who sit the Leaving Certificate each year, more than half avail of private grinds and over 10 per cent are attending fee-paying private schools, putting students who cannot afford it at a potential disadvantage,” explains Connolly.
“This is where jumpAgrade comes in. Our goal is to improve academic outcomes and progression rates of students at risk of educational disadvantage; ultimately leading to improved social outcomes for poverty, unemployment, homelessness and crime.”
Working alongside the traditional education sector, jumpAgrade supplements in-class learning by providing one-to-one support that schools do not have the resources to offer.
“In 2023, we partnered with 80 schools in disadvantaged communities in Ireland, helping over 400 students to improve their grades by an average of 22 per cent, 95 per cent of whom progressed to higher education,” she says.
The service is free to access for students, thanks to the generous support of the organisation’s donors and sponsors. “We have lots of exciting plans ahead as we work towards a more equitable, inclusive education system in Ireland, so watch this space,” adds Connolly.
