Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am sorry I had to leave earlier. I will address Dr. Gormley's point about the co-trustees in a moment, but when Mr. Curtis was giving his initial presentation, he said schools must engage with parents in the context of the ethos. He described the parent as being the primary educator and then he talked about that within the context of the moral and values framework of the ethos of the school.

I do not know if there is any research on this but in some cases parents have no choice but to send their children to a school of a particular ethos because of where they live. In many other cases, parents make the decision to send their children to the local school. I live in an area with two local schools, one of which is a Catholic boys' school, a diocesan college, and the other a Catholic girls' school run under one of the religious orders. If people are making the choice to send their child to the local school and consider that to be more important than anything else, there must be a lot of parents in Catholic ethos schools who want something much more inclusive in the RSE curriculum than is contained in the Catholic ethos description. When the delegates say they consult parents, exactly how does that take place? Do they just assume parents have sent their child to a school because they want a Catholic ethos, for example? I know that from my own experience.

For Dr. Gormley on the same issue, in respect of co-trustees, what about the rights of the other trustees and the parents of children in the other half of the equation? Surely they have the right to the ethos they have chosen, which is that they want complete, open, direct information without any judgmental imposition on them. Both delegates talk about the rights of parents but they are assuming what the parents want in both cases. Is that not true?