Recovery planning in the immersive education sector

It is no exaggeration that the academic advancement of every school child has been hampered as a consequence of the pandemic. It is under extremally challenging conditions that teachers and school leaders have been trying to expose children to the basic components of the curriculum through distance learning. The full extent of the impact this will have on children is yet to be determined, though some sparse research is starting to emerge (see, for example, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7591583/). However, in conjunction with teaching the curriculum, practitioners in the Irish medium sector are charged with familiarizing children with another language within the confines of the classroom. These linguistic skills are organically developed through immersion; immersion that has not been possible for nearly a complete school year. It is postulated that this lack of linguistic input will have a huge detrimental effect on the Irish language competency of these children, especially those children whose parents are monolingual. On returning to school, this linguistic gap will have to be plugged while teachers, like in every other setting, will be required to concentrate on remedying the problems facing children in relation to the basic skills covered in the curriculum (e.g. literacy and mathematics). This research collects, collates and analyses early empirical data so that the extent of the problem can be ascertained in relation to Key Stage 1 and 2 (with reference to key stage 3) in a variety of primary schools (units and free-standing schools) throughout Northern Ireland. The opinions and experiences of key stakeholders (teachers, leaders, parents) are reported and analysed and an attempt it made to offer practical recommendations for planning the recovery in the short term (0-3 months), in the medium term (6-12 months) and in the long term (12+ months)