Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It was a long way back.

On Deputy Frank Feighan's question about the area-based initiative, I am not entirely sure and must revert to him to ensure greater clarity. While there is an application process, I do not have the details to hand, but I will forward them to him.

On the reference to inclusive schools and the reason for the enrolment policy measures I have discussed, we have three kinds of post-primary school, namely, VEC schools, community colleges of one kind or another and the traditional free voluntary schools, as they are known in the jargon and which, by and large, have been run by the religious teaching orders. The community schools evolved from a situation in which, typically, a town had the brothers at one end, the sisters at the other and a technical school in the middle. The three schools then came together and are now funded by the State. However, they are independent of the VECs, although there is an involvement with them and their structures can vary.

The National Council for Special Education has recently published a report with a new set of 28 recommendations which I received on 17 May. Having spoken to parents of children with special needs, the council found they encountered a kind of soft barrier, where schools would decline to enrol such pupils, even though they had space for them. A school would suggest to the parents that it thought the VEC school down the road would be better equipped to meet the challenges the child would present. Alternatively, schools would claim they did not necessarily have all the requisite resources or state they would not take in the child in question without an undertaking from the Department of Education and Skills that a full grant would be given. One must be careful in how one decodes all of this because one is not sure one is getting the code right, but part of it is that schools compete for pupils in parts of the country. They compete on the basis of their school examination results and it is suggested they may do this if they consider that taking in such a pupil will require more time and will not necessarily enhance the academic performance of the school at junior cycle in the junior certificate examination.

We do not have proof positive but we know that the number of appeals under section 29 for non-admission to a school have risen exponentially, are costly and take up a great deal of teachers' time in July and August. That is the reference to that.