Ms Antoinette Nic Gearailt:

I am sorry Deputy Daly is gone because he asked about consultation. We have had an executive meeting. The executive is composed of school principals, members of boards of management who are not working directly in the schools, parents and teachers working on the ground. There is a relatively wide consultation base.

I agree with Fr. Paul Connell that the comment about certain management areas being more open than others is an unfortunate misrepresentation of the reality. Our structures may be different but huge work is put into the training of the boards. ACCS trains each board of management individually and collectively. They are as well informed as they possibly can be. As Deputy Martin said, some of them come in from an area outside of education. In terms of school management, huge investment is put into training. This year, 95 of the 96 schools are in regular contact with ACCS when making decisions. The schools that are not are heavily involved at ACCS level so the committee can take it as 100%.

Many decisions that are taken at board level are taken on advice. When things go wrong most issues are resolved at school level, to be honest, but there are the same channels of appeal. Deputy Daly implied that there are no channels of appeal. I will not reiterate them again but there are structured avenues, whether it is about teacher employment, student enrolment or exclusion and so forth. It does not matter whether it is ETBI, JMB or ACCS schools because the structures are in place.

The fear factor was raised as well. As other people said, it is not a fear but a fear of duplication, a risk that we are duplicating what already exists. The point John Curtis made earlier is important. Why are we separating education from childhood? Children are children and what impacts on their education is very often other factors outside of school. That is probably one of the main reasons to keep it with the Ombudsman for Children. Fr. Paul Connell spoke about the level of bureaucracy. As regards the €700,000 or €800,000, many schools would take that. It would go a long way towards paying the clerical officers, caretakers and so forth, or to work on the fabric of school buildings. Money should go where it is needed. It needs to go to supporting children on the ground, not into a structure that already exists. As Senator Gallagher said earlier, perhaps we could tweak what we already have if there are perceived gaps rather than putting another layer of administration in place.

Finally, Eileen and Joan mentioned parents. An unknown amount of work goes into encouraging parents to be involved, to be honest. I worked in an area where lack of confidence was probably the main thing that kept parents out. There is phenomenal work done on the ground to try to give parents the sense that they can walk through the school door, particularly if their own experience in their past leaves them a little reluctant to do so. However, we should be cognisant that the hardest time to get parents involved was during the time of the so-called Celtic tiger economy. Parents' lives became so busy it was difficult to get them involved in the school.