• 

  Community

• Tuesday July 29th, 2025 @ 22:14

Saints And Scholars

Ian Dunne, Head of Community at the club, spoke to us this week about the Saints and Scholars programme that is run in conjunction with Luas.

What is it?

A literacy and numeracy programme delivered to primary school children from 2nd to 6th class marrying up football with education. Sessions are run with half education and half football

Delivery

The programme is delivered over a 6 week period with each class. With one session per week each class has the same time slot for the 6 week period where the session is delivered.

Schools Taking part

We have over 25 primary schools taking part over the course of the school year. Schools from Dublin 8, 10, 12 as well as schools in Clondalkin and Palmerstown now take part in Saints and Scholars each year. Our plan is to grow this to 30 schools for school year 25/26.

Benefits of the program

By engaging with young people and linking education and football together we see real benefits particularly in attendance when Saints & Scholars is on. Attendance rises on average compared to the 6 week period previous.

Coupled with the educational and physical benefits for children, we are delivering an engaging numeracy and literacy session which ties into a popular hobby for most of the children and is different to the standard maths delivery of these subjects.

Feedback

Feedback from teachers and students has been brilliant with teachers scoring the programme as a 9.4 out of 10 on average and children scoring it as a 9.8 out of 10 on average.

Schools are particularly happy with the delivery, quality of the workbooks and the engagement of St Pats staff.

Dublin 8