A key focus of the Children’s School Lives (CSL) longitudinal study is to understand the factors which shape children’s experiences of their learning and ultimately their capacities to flourish both in the here and now as children, but also in their future lives as adults. Our previous report into the wellbeing of children (Report 7) highlighted attributes related to children’s feelings about themselves and their lives in school – levels of happiness, worry, interest in learning as well as sense of accomplishment and meaning in life. In this report we locate children’s flourishing within the wider social context of differences in wealth, poverty, social status and belonging in the society at large. It is children, including those in primary school, who are at greatest risk of poverty1 (CSO 2024) in Ireland. While all children have a right to education, as enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, (Assembly, U. G. [1989]. Convention on the Rights of the Child. United Nations, Treaty Series, 1577[3], 1–23.) children’s capacity to realise these rights within education is influenced by the social, material and economic conditions of their everyday lives. This is especially important with respect to the earlier years of education, including in primary schools, where the foundations for children’s educational trajectories are established.

Previous reports have considered how children experience their learning with respect to Pedagogy (Report 5), Curriculum and Assessment (Report 6) and Wellbeing (Report 7). We have also considered the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic (Report 2), in addition to transitions into the primary school (Report 4). A central thread has been the conceptualisation of learning as a social process, influenced, shaped and informed by the relationships children have with their teachers, their peers, their parents and more widely between primary schools and their local communities. It is through these relationships that children come to know themselves and their place in the world. Understood as children’s social worlds, these are influenced by their socio-economic status - experiences of wealth and poverty including markers of social status and belonging; their access to good food, adequate clothing, warmth and housing; local communities which are safe and which provide opportunities for fun, play and wider community engagement; family and support networks that provide children with the love, care and nurture they need to thrive. In this report we delve more deeply into these social dimensions of children’s everyday lives, exploring how these influence their primary school lives.

P.3 Poverty and stigma

• Levels of poverty and wealth strongly interconnect with children’s sense of place and space in their local communities.
• In the most marginalised communities, issues of social stigma, urban degradation and constraints on children’s movements (space) emerged in the accounts of children and their parents. However, a strong sense of attachment to place and inter-generational family networks was also evident.
• Teachers and principals in the most socially deprived case study schools referred to the impact of drug addiction, food poverty and trauma in what they identified as ‘forgotten’ communities...

P.23 In very marginalised communities, parents also referred to concerns around urban degradation and social change, and especially the impact of drug addiction and a breakdown in community connectedness, re-iterating also the comments noted previously by some children in relation to the curtailment of their movements...

P.24 The structural impact of poverty and inequality is also clearly reflected in the narratives of principals and teachers. Building on those of some of the parents we interviewed, issues of stigma, trauma, drug addiction and low selfesteem came to the fore in a number of the case study schools located in the most marginalised communities...