Ms Mai Fanning:

We do not have any statistics at National Parents Council Post Primary on the figures. Every year, we are inundated with distraught parents who have not got a place for their child for various reasons. We see the most support from our cohort of parents for a place in a school to be given preference, if one has a sibling in that school. Sometimes there may be six or seven years between siblings and one has had the experience of a school and it is important that one's next child has access to that school as well. For the same reasons that have been spoken about before, we do not hold that because you has had a parent or grandparent in a school, preferential treatment should be given. The movement of people for employment purposes or in other circumstances, for example, or even in the context of those returning to the country, it happens time and again that families cannot get children into schools.

One of the main things that crops up every year is that you will be offered a place in November, you do not get the school you was looking for, you may end up getting nowhere and you may find out the following June, July or August that you got a place. From speaking to schools, it is all down to the fact that parents will enrol their children in as many schools as they can. Parents will pay the fee to keep their children on the books and then decide at the end of the year to which school they want to send them.

All of those places are locked up within schools. In terms of giving everybody an equal shot at places that are out there, we will hit peak numbers in 2023 to 2024. They will start to decline slightly after that. In terms of giving everybody absolutely equal access, we have to look at how school places are allocated and what happens when schools are oversubscribed. That may be because a parent has accepted three or four different schools.

We should focus on a system whereby if you accept a school place, you are taken off the other lists. That offers a free space at a time in the year where it does not become a crisis point and this is all dealt with in the same month or two, such as between the middle of October and the middle of November. Schools would have some sort of a link that one could not have a child on the roll and accepted in two or three different schools.