Mr. Alan Power:

On the question of the centralised system, to understand the process today of how parents apply to send their child to school, the first point of call is the NCSE. A SENO is not assigned at that point because the SENO is attached to the school. What the family gets from the NCSE is a list. The parents then go around and call dozens of schools, asking if there is a place for their child. There is no visibility of whether schools have places. Parents are just given a list and they call all of the schools. There are thousands of parents making fruitless begging calls. It is a brutal system in respect of what parents are made do. There are also GDPR issues in sending around applications to dozens of schools. That enrolment for schools is open from October to November and the NCSE publishes its list of upcoming available classes in the following April, May or June in itself is ridiculous because enrolment has closed. The parents have missed the window for applying for the school. A simple thing the NCSE could do is to publish that list earlier, with clarity on how many places are available in each class for the upcoming year. It would save the schools a lot of time in fielding all these calls. The introduction of a centralised system would not be rocket science. We do it for the CAO. A secure system could be introduced to prevent any GDPR challenges. Also, the NCSE would be getting data on where the next child is coming from. Today, I do not know how it does it. Deputy Tully mentioned the SENOs. Some are contactable and some are not. The NCSE say the SENOs are its eyes on the ground. Some of them do not pick up the phone because there is nothing they can do for parents because there are no classes in the area. Parents could be calling them 20, 30 or 40 times and they do not get back to them. It is a crazy system. It absolutely needs to be centralised.