Professor Kathleen Lynch:

I want to reply on this idea. I appreciate what Mr. Dolan said about the Department and having committees but under the legislation the only people who have a right of consultation are those who run the education system under the 1998 Act. What concerns me is that the education disadvantage Bill will have representation from civil society but it will not have in its formation. That is not the way it is set up. What these groups are saying is that there are many civil society groups for whom the current procedure, which is not a statutory one because it is clearly informal, is not effective. I know from research that the motto for people with disabilities in Europe is, "Nothing about us without us". That is a very useful mechanism to deploy when one is planning and designing policies. No matter how annoyed one might be by the civil society groups which appear before the committee, they usually have a message. That is a very important issue for me and it is in my presentation.

An important question about DEIS was raised. DEIS is a massive achievement; I do not doubt that. I am so old I was involved in designing it in the early stages before many here were around. It raises a big question, however. Have we institutionalised inequality in the education system? Let us say we had colour as the basis of determination of DEIS schools. What would we say? Would we say that was not segregation? That is the question I am asking. I am not blaming the Department of Education and Skills as this is a big policy consideration. We have to look at whether we have institutionalised economic inequality in such a way that we say that those schools are grand for those poor kids and we will give them an extra bit of money. However, we know - I will come back to the private market question - that we can buy education service in the private market and give advantage to our own children. There is a question there. It is not that the system itself does not function well - it does very good work - but have we institutionalised the inevitability of class and other inequalities in education such assistance?

I am greatly exercised as an academic over many years and as someone with an interest in policy about the lack of disaggregated data on the junior certificate and the leaving certificate. Every year the results come out and we have no social class analysis. The reason is that we have no data by social class. Yet we have everybody's PPS number. In many universities in the United States one is not allowed to register unless one gives one's full designations, including race, ethnic status, whether one is in the care of or in the leave of the state. There is absolutely no reason we could not institutionalise that. We can anonymise that because we have a very digitalised society. I believe it would make a difference.

On the question about the private education market, it is a huge issue in this country. There is a massive private education market. I do not know the solution to it. It operates as private business and, as we know, all the private education colleges are perfectly entitled not to disclose data to the HEA because they are private businesses and for profit. There is a need for a review but I do not know whose responsibility it is. I was asked to address a meeting of trade unions recently and I was told that in some schools, teachers leave the classroom but come back a few hours later to give private grinds at €30 to €40 an hour to children. This would not be allowed in many other countries. As I said earlier, music is almost an entirely private business. If one wants to do well in performance in music in the leaving certificate, unless one happens to have someone in the family who is musically proficient - there are some schools which do it differently - one has to resort to private business. That is what worries me - I made this point in my paper - about this proposal for continuous assessment. It is a different concern from that of other people but once one takes assessment and provision for preparation for it out of school, one automatically advantages people who are more advantaged. It has happened in other countries and it will happen here. When it comes to competition for advantage, it is like the law of self-interest, as I have already said.

I have lived in a number other European countries, including Denmark, and one does not have the level of anxiety one has about public examinations here because there are alternatives. Also, there is not that fear people in Ireland have that their children will end up with no job or no home, or with nothing.

If we allow our society to become more unequal, then we create a society of fear and fear drives parents, parents drive children and that drives the private market. There are other issues about the private market that need to be looked at. It is not my job to do that but it is a very big issue in Irish education. To my knowledge, no studies have been done on it, no information is available and it is very hard to find any data on it.