This paper is by a Training and Business Development Manager and a Board member of an incorporated company now known as NCU CLG (NCU) Training, which traces its origins back to an Unemployment Action Group founded in 1983. This not-for-profit educational organisation provides Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI) certified training programs on the National Framework of Qualifications of Ireland (NFQ) for those who self-identify as marginalised or low-paid workers in both the local and the extended community. The aim is to support them in finding gainful employment and becoming self-sufficient to counter poverty and unemployment, irrespective of schooling and education. The ethos that guides NCU Training is that all members of the society, regardless of circumstance, are entitled to quality education, training and access to quality, well-paid jobs. Its series of training programs is recognised as a local solution to a widespread and long-standing problem of unemployment in Ireland going back to the 1980s when the emigration of college graduates who left to find work and further training opportunities soared to 30 percent. The contemporary situation is favourably different, but the need for a series of short-term courses remains. The paper begins with two collaborative case stories of different and diverse participants’ encounters with formal schooling, which had a deep and lasting impression that shaped their life paths. These are ethnographic accounts constructed as creative portraits, which bring photos, drawings, poems and song lyrics among other resources to make it real (see Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1983, cited by Mills and Morton, 2013, p.88). It then does some backward mapping to tease out their lived experiences of child poverty and the ways this impacted not only on schooling but subsequently. Taking another cue from Mills and Morton (2013, p.3), telling this story is a deeply humanistic endeavour with the twofold intention of creating knowledge about the experience of being unemployed and charting educative actions in response to the challenges. It proceeds with an analysis of some causes for concern in Irish politics, culture and society (Higgins, 2007), which lends itself to policy debates about schooling, notably the complexities of the educational and social worlds of those who are in positions of weakness. While this work in Dublin has the potential to plug into a city-based team and provide a contribution to a multi-cities ethnography, this paper concludes by charting the work to be done to make it happen (see Hughes, 2023).

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