Dr. Gabrielle Tracy

And I mean, they could sort this overnight by simply issuing guidelines to the schools on how to manage this and the schools can work with that.

But as it stands, it's an individual thing, just back and forth.

And that's in all schools across the board, you know.

So we're very lucky in the sense that, well, I say very lucky, it took us over a year.

So my kids were originally in the classroom for an entire year, for the whole of junior entrance.

And it took us a year to get started.

a suitable arrangement in the sense where they are now actually withdrawn from the class.

So there's various different arrangements in place there.

There's prayers in the morning so the girls go to school five or ten minutes later than all the other children.

They are collected five or ten minutes earlier than everybody else and let out of class early to avoid the afternoon prayers.

So these are all things that we've come to an arrangement with the school.

and to try and kind of find where it best suits everything.

So now they've been very good.

The religious instruction is put at a time of day where we can adapt the day around that and the girls either come out and they'll go into another class or something else will happen with them.

But in the majority of schools, the majority of parents, those children are just pushed to the back of the classroom, given a colouring book or a set of headphones for the 30 minutes that this is undertaken every day.

Well, I had to do that from a very, very early age.

I mean, they started school at five.

And I mean, at that stage, we had no proper update arrangements other than sitting down the back of the classroom, doing completely separate work with their back turned to the rest of the class.

So how do you explain that to a five-year-old?

You know, we kind of sat down and explained that their friends would be doing certain things at a certain time of the day and that their teacher would be giving them something else to do.