Rethinking Educational Disadvantage Symposium, Royal Irish Academy
The Rethinking Educational Disadvantage Symposium took place at the Royal Irish Academy, on 6th October 2022. Professor Paul Downes, Director of the Educational Disadvantage Centre, Institute of Education, Dublin City University was the Discussant in response to presentations by Professor Diane Reay, University of Cambridge, Professor Kathleen Lynch, University College Dublin and Dr. Noel Purdy, Independent Chair of Expert Panel on Educational Underachievement in Northern Ireland for the Report and Northern Irish Government Action Plan A Fair Start. The Question & Answer for this Educational Disadvantage: Research & Policy session was chaired by Professor Judith Harford, University College Dublin.
The Opening Address for the Symposium was given by Simon Harris, Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science and the Introduction to the event was presented by Professor Áine Hyland, Professor Emeritus, University College Cork.
Professor Downes’ response interrogated a range of themes including the role of the OECD in educational policy making, key concerns at EU Commission level for social inclusion in education in light of the pandemic, the need for a postCartesian paradigm for education to overcome mind/body and reason/emotion splitting, to reconceptualise health and education relations in school settings. Highlighting the limited focus on poverty in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, he identified the framework of the UN Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health as a particularly promising avenue for expanding on a rights based approach to social justice. Professor Downes also proposed a spatial turn for education and the social sciences to encompass relational spaces as framing preconditions for conceptions of care and justice. These themes built on his work as a member of the EU Commission’s Expert Advisory Group for the new Pathways to School Success initiative and his recent book, Reconstructing Agency in Developmental and Educational Psychology: Inclusive Systems as Concentric Space (Routledge 2020).