Billy Kelleher
Question:537. Deputy Billy Kelleher asked the Minister for Education and Skills her views on concerns (details supplied) regarding information being sought by her Department. [5973/15]
View answerTuesday, 10 February 2015
Questions (537)
Written answers
The Department of Education and Skills has consulted with the Data Protection Commissioner in relation to the collection of information on pupil ethnic or cultural background on the Primary Online Database. Some categories of ethnic or cultural background are required for international reporting purposes and in mainstream schools for enhanced capitation payments. The Data Protection Commissioner advises that the most equitable way to collect this type of sensitive information is to give all pupils an opportunity to identify their own ethnic and cultural background and consent to the information being passed to the Department, rather than targeting a particular ethnic or cultural group in the data collection, and so we have proceeded with the question on that basis. The question on Ethnic and Cultural background is not compulsory and parents have the option to choose no consent to answer the question.
We are committed to reviewing the questions asked in POD. As part of this we have reviewed our question In POD on the collection of information on Ethnic or Cultural Background. We feel that the question used to collect data on ethnic or cultural background should be harmonised across all the education partners and other bodies who collect this type of information. As the CSO is the National Statistical Office, we are taking our lead from them. However, while the question asked in POD is not the exact same as the question asked in the Census of Population, it is based on the question. The main difference between the Census of Population question and the question asked in POD was that we also included the category of Roma as Ireland has International data reporting requirements on this group. The Census does not have a category of Roma.
The Department is currently working on making changes to the text of some of the response categories to Ethnic and Cultural Background question. This includes changes to the suggested consent form for schools to collect the information for POD and to the categories as they appear on the POD database. An updated consent form (in both English and Irish) will be available for downloading from the Department's website in the coming week. These changes will also be reflected on the POD database in the coming weeks.
The changes that will be made to the question asked in POD are outlined as follows. Black African will be replaced with, Black or Black Irish - African,Any other Black Background will be replaced with, Black or Black Irish - Any other Background, Chinese will be replaced with, Asian or Asian Irish-Chinese, Any other Asian will be replaced with, Asian or Asian Irish - Any other background.
While we accept the point that not everyone is happy with the a list of categories as they are laid out, it is very difficult to agree a list of categories that can satisfy everyone when discussing such a subjective matter, particularly the range of possible categories is infinitely wider than what is outlined in our question.In this regard the Statistics Section of the Department met with the CSO's Census of Population Division to discuss concerns such as yours. They too accept that the variant of the ethnicity question on the 2016 census may fall short of what could be expected in today's multi -racial Ireland. Unfortunately, given the no-change' census approach being adopted for Census of Population 2016 it is not possible to change the CSO question at this stage. However the CSO has indicated that it is considering holding a seminar to examine how the data in this area can be improved from the point of view of maximising the number of write-in responses to increase the variety of ethnic descriptions captured, the classification system used, and also looking at the nationality vs. citizenship issue and examining generally how the outputs from the census can be improved in this important area. The Department of Education and Skills will be participating in this seminar. Note that the question on POD is intended to capture ethnic and cultural background only and there is a separate question on POD for nationality.