Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Ó Cathasaigh. I will ask my questions now. It is quite striking that the reporting is on things the way they are, as opposed to reporting against needs and whether the needs are being met. An example is a school where a third of the pupils are sitting out for religion tuition in the class and that is an area where the Department has no intention of building another multidenominational school because that is based on other factors and not the needs of the local community and the need to have more diverse ethoses. Do the officials believe they should be reporting on different indicators, with those being what we need from our schools and to what extent we are meeting those needs? I note one of the indicators is around the number of multidenominational, interdenominational and nondenominational schools, but again it is the number that there are and it is against the programme for Government commitment to increase that to 400. Many parents have raised with me that the fact they are not asked by schools what ethos they want their children to be taught through. CSO data look at what religion people are as opposed to what ethos they want for their family, so there is a big gaping hole there. At the very least, people should be asked that question when their child is going to school. It would give us a much better picture of what the needs are.

In addition, the examination of school transport was begun in 2021 and it is now the end of 2023, so I imagine we will not get sight of that until 2024. Is it reasonable to expect a review to take three years when we all kind of know what the problems are? One of the main problems is I do not believe climate considerations have been factored in at all with much of the work of the Department around transport. We in the Green Party had hoped that transport for education would be moved to the Department of Transport, which would have a different understanding of how to link all the various aspects of transport together, but right now we are in a situation where pupils must live kilometres away from their school to be entitled to school transport, even though we know the congestion is in urban centres. That is where the piece needs to be fixed to ensure children are not unnecessarily stuck in cars. That is one of the frustrations we all have around school transport. It just does not seem to be getting better.

Do the officials agree with some of the difficulties I see in the indicators that have been selected? Do they have suggestions for how they might improve? Do not get me wrong, it is a step in the right direction to have any kind of transparency about how the budget is spent, but do the officials have suggestions for next year on how it could be improved, bearing in mind we have an obligation to spend public money in the interests of meeting the needs of people living in our country?