Jesuit University Support and Training (JUST) is a project seeking to help young people (and some not so young) in Ballymun break the cycle of deprivation that kept them from getting into third level education. Tess Martin tells the story.
There are approximately 20,000 people living in Ballymun, north Dublin. The most reliable statistics suggest that only between two to three percent of the population there ever make it to third level education.
It was to address this imbalance that in 2006 the Irish Jesuit Province, in partnership with Dublin City University (DCU), initiated the Jesuit University Support and Training (JUST) project. Its aim is to enable greater numbers of Ballymun residents to begin and complete the process of gaining a degree.
JUST offers off-campus education and support for different categories of students. These include school-leavers who would benefit from a year of pre-college preparation. Secondly, there are students who have already earned a place in college on a diploma or degree course, and need support in this new environment. Thirdly, there are local people who have completed a primary degree and are interested in further study and who still welcome local facilities and camaraderie.
The programmes provide both education and support. On offer are study groups, teaching resources, learning and study aids, cultural events, friendship, and many ways to help students address any social disadvantage in higher education they may experience.
This is a real issue. Even the very small number of people who made it to third level in the past may not have been able to stay the course and ended up dropping out for various reasons. These may have included having no place to study, no computer, no supervision, no childminding facilities, no affirming environment. The JUST project assists in all these areas, including mentoring, tuition and, above all, support.
JUST had an intake of twenty-five in year one, which was doubled in September 2007, happily exceeding targets and expectations. ‘The first year was overwhelmingly female; we had three male students only,’ says Kevin O’Higgins, SJ, JUST director.
‘This year, 20% of our intake are young men, including school-leavers. The majority are in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties. But we have people across the age range. Our oldest student is seventy-two. He had to leave school at age twelve to work, and had to wait till sixty-five to have a second chance at education. He has now gained a business degree from DCU and is continuing to study.
‘We are planning to work with local schools, to have our students talk to the senior-cycle classes about JUST, to explain how it has helped them. We are keen to have greater numbers of school leavers gain access to third level,’ he says.
A former Head of Philosophy at the Milltown Institute, Kevin O’Higgins says that these kinds of access programmes are taken for granted in parts of the developing world but are a new initiative for Ireland. A significant factor of JUST is that it helps people to blossom where they are: JUST is off-campus, located in the heart of Ballymun. Its offices and one classroom are sited in a tower block, while another classroom is accommodated in the Ballymun Job Centre.
The JUST class of 2007 are studying at universities across Dublin in an impressive range of subjects. Ashling Palmer is halfway through her second year, studying for a BA in Theology and Psychology. She contributed to an RTE radio programme shortly after JUST was launched last year, just before she started college. On radio she explained what a big step she was taking in enrolling in a third-level course. And it was a giant leap. Ashling became pregnant as a teenager and left school at seventeen.
‘I come from a large family where nobody went to college, so there’s not many in the family I can talk to about what I’m doing. I really want to make this work but I just know I won’t make it on my own. I felt I needed a bit of moral support and came to JUST.’
One year on, the good news is that Ashling did exceptionally well in first year, obtaining an upper second-class honour in her exams. Her daughter is now ten. ‘My daughter Sophie says she is very proud of me and talks about when she will go to college. That is very powerful for me to hear, and I feel I’m already breaking the cycle here where so many young people wouldn’t ever talk of going to third level. I want a better life for both of us. I believe education is the key to that,’ she says.
Kevin O’Higgins is impressed with the calibre of student that JUST is attracting: ‘If anything, I’d say the people we are getting to date are exceptionally bright and motivated but they have just never had the chance. A critical part of the project is that there have been four Jesuit priests living in Ballymun for twenty-five years so we have a great network of personal contacts. There has been a trust established over the years and we are able to build on that,’ he says.
JUST is funded by the University Hall Trust which is almost one hundred years old, and was initially set up by a group of business people to build a university hall in Hatch Street Dublin for UCD students in Earlsfort Terrace. The subsequent move of the campus to Belfield meant the closing down and selling off of the hall. It seems appropriate that another potential student sector is now being helped by the Trust.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (March 2008), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
