I move:
That Dáil Éireann shall consider the Report of the Joint Committee on Education and Social Protection entitled "Report on the Draft General Scheme of an Education (Admission of Schools) Bill 2013", copies of which were laid before Dáil Éireann on 5 March 2014.
I welcome the opportunity to debate in the Chamber the report on the draft general scheme of an education (admission to schools) Bill 2013. I would like to speak first about the process involved as it is a new one whereby, before publishing draft legislation, Ministers publish the heads or general scheme of a Bill and refer it to the relevant Oireachtas committee. In the case of this scheme, the Joint Committee on Education and Social Protection decided to invite submissions, hold hearings and draw up a report, potentially including recommendations. That is actually what happened. The committee received more than 50 written submissions on the draft general scheme of the Bill. It was made clear in the call for submissions that if people wished to make an oral submission also, they would have to indicate as much in their submissions. We invited everyone to the hearings who specifically requested the opportunity to make an oral presentation. Subsequently, 23 groups and individuals attended to make their oral presentations having made written submissions.
Having previously dealt with the heads of a gender recognition Bill, what the committee did differently this time was to bring in individuals as well as groups. I suggested that course as Chair of the committee because the point had been made to me that in the Oireachtas we tend to meet with groups, particularly lobby groups, and do not have enough individual citizens in. We need that voice too. There are a huge number of professional lobby groups in every sector, often charities or representative associations, but one needs to hear the voices of citizens also when the Oireachtas has stakeholders expressing viewpoints.
The joint committee held three hearings. In addition to the hearings, I note that the written submissions themselves ranged widely across diverse issues raised by the heads of the Bill. I thank the Oireachtas Library and Research Service. In helping the joint committee to draw up the report, the service put together a discussion document which included a great deal of background information. It went through every submission and covered all the different themes that were raised in the submissions and hearing process. Without the help of the Library and Research Service, the joint committee would not have produced as good a report. That work was extremely helpful.
To give an example of that, the report goes through the current legislation. On page 13, it talks about previous reports. I will go into that because this section of the report is important because this issue has been looked at by the Department for some time and work has been ongoing with regard to this issue. For example, there was an audit of enrolment policies in 2008. The then Minister for Education requested this audit the aim of which was to identify any disparities between schools in terms of their admission policies. The audit included pupils from the Traveller community and those with special needs. It looked at how the enrolment policies of some of these schools compared with their actual enrolment patterns as well as the effect of the admission practices and policies on the distribution of newcomer pupils across schools. This was important because when the Minister and his Department were drawing up the draft general scheme, they obviously took this into account. There were a number of findings about that.
One of the things it would have brought out, that was also brought out during our hearings, was that there are aspects of written enrolment policies that may be deemed exclusionary, for example, pre-enrolling children from birth or providing preference to children of past pupils thereby putting new arrivals to communities at a disadvantage. An ESRI study in 2009, Adapting to Diversity: Irish Schools and Newcomer Students, looked at a similar issue. It drew from the first national survey of primary and second-level principals on diversity and complemented this with 12 detailed case studies of primary and secondary schools. It found that newcomer students comprised 10% of the primary school-going population and 6% of the post-primary school-going population in 2007. Notably, this was not evenly distributed in primary schools and four in ten primary schools had no newcomer children while others had a very high proportion of newcomer students. That report identified a similar problem which the Minister is attempting to address in the legislation he is planning.
I will go through the recommendations but the media publicity around the committee hearings tended to focus on certain issues. For example, an article by Kitty Holland in The Irish Times at the time concentrated on the issue of the discrimination involved in giving priority to students with a baptismal certificate or who have been brought up in a particular faith so that would apply to faith schools such as those run by the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland. In fact, this is not reflective of the audit and the ESRI report I have just outlined, which identified the issue of enrolment policies which are basically "first come, first served" where children must be enrolled from birth. This is possibly a much greater problem in terms of discrimination in practice.
One of the issues that was brought to the attention of the committee and which would not have got much publicity related to two submissions. I am very aware of this issue because it is an issue in my community. The submissions were from Lucan from Ms Colette Kavanagh who is principal of Esker Educate Together national school and Mr. Tom Moriarty who is principal in Adamstown Castle Educate Together national school. Ms Kavanagh said that parental school choice has been shown to be a significant determinant of segregation in schools and that unregulated parental choice should not be granted at the expense of social cohesion. She argued that the current system of school choice favours the Irish-educated Catholic parent over the immigrant in almost all cases. Mr. Moriarty made a similar point. He said that there are schools in Dublin existing side by side where one is almost completely international in nature and the other is exclusively Irish. He said that we are essentially looking at racial segregation. He argued that where there are a number of schools in an area operating under the same patron, they should be obliged to operate a common enrolment policy. Again, we took that on board when we were drawing up our recommendations.
The Oireachtas Library and Research Service looked at the international situation and referred to a 2009 paper that looked at parental school choice in the Netherlands. It found that the more that parental choices are influenced by the ethnic mix of a school's students, the more segregated they are likely to become over time and the more difficult it is for policy makers to ignore the fact that schools are segregated. The OECD published a working paper in January 2012 that looked at current policies regarding school choice in OECD countries. This review showed that more than two thirds of OECD countries have increased school choice opportunities for parents over the past 25 years. However, the author of the paper describes the debate around school choice as perhaps one of the most ardently discussed issues in the current educational policy debate with school choice advocates claiming that expanding school choice will increase equity while school choice critics argue that it leads to segregation based on socioeconomic status and ethnicity.
This is not something that is very much in the public domain but it did come up in the submissions and debates during our committee hearings. On a personal level - I am not speaking as Chair of the committee and I know the two principals involved - this is a real problem in Lucan. There is an issue there about racial segregation. The situation will change this year because the Department has given the go-ahead to a new building for Esker Educate Together national school so the new school will be much nearer to where the children are coming from. Currently, most of the children in that school are bused out of their communities to this school because they could not get places in the local school. These children are largely from new communities that have come to Ireland and made their life here. This is a very sensitive issue. It is a very sensitive issue for me to raise as the local Deputy but it is the type of thing we need to know about because it is happening.
I will go through the conclusions and make a few points. Conclusion one was a huge issue of debate. On the face of it, it is so obvious that giving priority to children because they have baptismal certificates or have been christened or brought up in a particular faith is discriminatory. There is no question but that the views expressed by committee members would be that this is not the ideal situation and that a school in a small town outside urban areas should cater for everybody. That issue was raised in many different submissions but it was also discussed among committee members. We could not really come up with a proposal to deal with that particular form of discrimination because of the Constitution-----