::Young Gypsy-Traveller:: Media: Save the Children ::

It would start with name-calling, a string of obscenities flung at Lisa Devers as she arrived at school each day. Then the violence would begin, elbows in the ribs, shoving on the stairs, punching, kicking, scratching, spitting.

Lisa is 15 and the child of a travelling family. She has attended, and left, four schools in the space of two years and will never go back. She has had her nose broken and is partially deaf after one particularly vicious beating. She wants to be a beauty therapist and knows she needs qualifications, but the bullying and intimidation are more than she can bear.

So she has become one of the estimated 80% of traveller children in Scotland who are not receiving a secondary school education. It is a similar picture across the rest of the UK and Europe, where campaigners say around two million traveller children are being denied the basic right to an education. Charities estimate that there are around 150,000 travellers in the UK, many of them under 18.

According to a recent study by Save the Children, the education of such youngsters is being disrupted not so much by their itinerant lifestyle as by the bullying, discrimination and prejudice they encounter on a daily basis. The report highlights how school systems fail to respond to the needs of traveller children and do not reflect or even acknowledge their culture and lifestyle. Many parents were terrified to let their children go from the protective family-orientated atmosphere of the traveller community to the hostile environment of local schools. Only 10% of travellers' children cited school as their main source of learning.

Save the Children has called for radical action Europe-wide to address the problem. In Scotland, where a recent report commissioned by the Scottish parliament found institutional racism against the travelling community, the charity wants nothing less than a national strategy for all local authorities and the development of a curriculum sensitive to the needs of the community.

"The report flagged up the appalling inequities in access to education for Roma-Gypsy travellers," said Save the Children development worker Michelle Lloyd. "Despite a whole raft of intentions and legislative conventions by many countries, the situation is similar across the board. Young people are being systematically denied an education.

"And there is no evidence to suggest that gypsies and travellers don't want an education. The travelling community is not asking for anything special, just an education that reflects and respects their culture. Here in Scotland we need a national strategy to address the difficulties faced by young travellers. There are examples of good practice by some local authorities but there is no consistency."

Lisa just wants to be able to go to school. "It's hard when you are being called gypsy bastard day after day for all of your school life," she said. "It is really hard not to answer back. It's hard going to school knowing you are going to get hit, maybe even hospitalised."

She has had teachers tell her to bite her tongue when she is abused; that her attackers will lose interest and pick on someone else. She has walked four miles home rather than sit on the bus with her abusers, has nursed bruises and wiped spittle from her face more times than she cares to remember. This week, she still sports an angry red weal around her eye after she was attacked as she waited in her mum's car outside a shop in their new home of Tullibody, a small town in central Scotland.

"It would always be OK for a couple of weeks at each of the schools but then they would find out we were travellers, and the abuse would start," she said. "It would get to the stage where me and my sister would be sitting at the breakfast table crying our eyes out and begging mum not to send us to school." Her elder sister, Jamie-Lee, 16, has also dropped out. Bright and articulate, her weight has dropped to seven stone, her dreams of studying business administration are in tatters.

For Lisa and Jamie-Lee's mother, Patsy, 37, the ordeal of her daughters has terrible echoes of her own experience.

"I left school when I was 11," she said. "My parents decided not to send me back. We travelled all the time, moving on every two or three months, but my mum always enrolled us in the local school even if it was for a couple of weeks. But it wouldn't take the other children long to discover we were travellers. I would be pushed in the playground, I had my front teeth knocked out. Children would refuse to sit beside me. At playtime you feel like an alien because they stay away from you in their own wee groups and decide who is the bravest to come up and hit you. Eventually, my mum said I wasn't going back and she taught me at home. I want my girls to have an education, but I won't put them through that."

Patsy says teachers were rarely sympathetic to their plight, trying to shift the blame to the girls, hoping the family would move away to avoid having to deal with the problem. She says any measures adopted by govern ment to tackle the problem must include staff as well as pupils.

"I would like them to educate the teachers as well as the pupils because so many of them are ignorant about the travelling community," she said. "This has been going on for so long and it needs to change. It does not matter where you go in the world, there are always going to be travellers."

Patsy is adamant that she will not move her girls on from Tullibody. The family is putting down roots and Lisa is looking at the possibility of taking night classes to try to get some qualifications.

"I think it might be easier to go to night school. I'm going to see if it's something I can do," she said. "But I'm still nervous about it in case it's like it was before. People need to understand we are not bad people, that we are not different. We are human beings."