Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael)
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I thank the Minister of State for taking the time. I had a meeting with her last week that was very comprehensive. Some of this is just me thinking on further from that meeting.

I apologise, but I had to go to another event and the Minister of State may already have answered this question. The parents in my home constituency of Dublin South-Central have the experience of being handed a list and told to apply for all those schools when a child is coming up to primary or secondary school age. In some instances the primary school is divided into a junior primary and a senior primary, which was a new thing to me until I came in here. There can be a special class in the junior primary, but not in the senior one. They will have separate principals, separate boards yet be on the same grounds. A child who does not have any additional needs will smoothly transition from second class over to third class from one school to another, but a child with additional needs will not. Their parents are then left with the trauma and fear of what to do next and whether they can get a child into third class in another school.

I have worked with organisations like the Dublin 12 Autism Group and Involve Autism which the Minister of State has spoken with also. They are great advocates, have been the instruments of change and stimulated change, but what are we expressly doing to stop that? It is not okay for us to be employing people at a State level who are there to assist parents in finding schools places where the assistance consists of offering a list of 30 schools. I have held public meetings with a couple of hundred parents in the room where many have stood up crying and telling us they have had to apply to 30 schools. I raised this with the Minister of State, but part of me also does not understand why we do not have a portal for people to log on to where they can input that they live in Walkinstown, their child was born on such and such a date and they are going to need a primary school. There should be some means of feeding-in there so a school is not left with applications from perhaps 20 families when another school has applications from the same 20 families. There are schools which have co-ordinated their effort together and pooled their resources to work this out between them, but schools should not really have to do that. Either the SENOs do that or perhaps I am wrong in that and we need to create some sort of portal as a means for efficient allocation. The regular system of applying to a school and accessing school just does not cut it in this environment.

I will leave it at that for now.