Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for their valuable work and for joining us today. I know of hundreds of families around the country who home educate their children. The research from the UK is fairly old and we do not have any research on the reasons people home educate. For this reason, much of my experience is based on anecdotal evidence. That said, the research in the UK shows that approximately 50% of families who home school take their children out of school rather than starting home education for ideological reasons. I am a former chair of Home Education Network Ireland and from the contact I have had, I would say that the same is probably true in Ireland, excepting the current blip of Covid-19 related home education. I have heard stories from one particular family in Galway of a child crying before going to school every day for two years. The family finally took the steps to take the child out of school and found the experience to be like chalk and cheese. Not every family can do that.

We are dealing with the problem after the horse has bolted in a sense. We are looking at how we deal with bullying. In the Growing Up in Ireland study, 40% of nine-year-olds - this is going back years - said they had experienced bullying in the previous year. We are dealing with that problem when instead we should be asking how we are organising our education in a way that is facilitating that.

The Sudbury school system in Boston, with which I have many links, has done research on bullying which has shown that if children are with mixed-age groups, it brings out a sense of empathy in them. Are there other steps and changes we can make to our education system rather than dealing with bullying happening in the system as we see it now?

Other families are affected. For instance, transphobia is a significant problem. Many children in the home education community would have experienced transphobia and homophobia. What is it we can do with the schools? Rather than the anti-bullying policies, what can we do with the school structure that would suit our society better and better reflect what is going on outside school?