Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

I endorse everything Deputy Sargent said. The more clarity we can bring to the procedure, the better. Prospective parents are often baffled by the admission procedure and by the Department of Education and Skills website. All they want is clarity as to what to do and what chance they have of getting their child into a particular school, and I am only talking about parents from Ireland. When one talks to parents who have come here from abroad, they are completely mystified by the procedure for admission to schools.

A good first step for the Minister would be to start with the Department of Education and Skills website. Before I came into the House today, I logged onto the website and clicked the "about us" button, although there was nothing there. I know quite a bit about the Minister and about how the Department operates, so the least we could do is to provide some good, clear information on the Department of Education and Skills website, which I think is stuck in 1996. For a minimum effort, we could get a maximum result. That is part of a process which has perhaps become unduly politicised over the years. Once we get into the area of criteria, they must be verifiable.

I looked at the bands for school projects. The bands are obviously divided in sub-bands. I could not find verifiable criteria as to how we define the level of priority of a school. Is a rapidly developing area one developing by 1%, 3% or 5%? If one cannot verify something, it is prone to interpretation, tweaking and political patronage.

That is a dangerous road to follow. We should put this information into the public domain and it should be verifiable, whether by CSO or Department of Education and Innovation statistics. The sooner we move towards that objective, the better.

This debate has to a large extent focused on the earthquake that has shook the Catholic Church in Ireland. We have to re-examine our systems of patronage. Parents should be able to send their children to primary schools which are close to where they live, in which either Irish or English is spoken and which offer a choice of religious patronage. These simple choices should be available to every child in this State.

We also need to investigate the issue of designating schools as disadvantaged. In a sense, this is an on-off button approach in that either a school is designated or it is not. A sliding scale would be more appropriate because designation carries considerable baggage, if not stigma. By making available a broad range of supports ranging from schools which need major help in overcoming demographic, social and economic difficulties to ones which are doing well, we could break down some of our assumptions about schools in certain areas.

All I could find from the Department's website was a list of areas that have experienced significant growth. During a recent Adjournment debate, an Opposition Deputy produced a clear map which showed in colour coded form the exact level of growth experienced by various areas. That type of information should be available from the Department's website without the need for a freedom of information request.

The Minister is not long in her new job and she faces a major task. The headline issue of the day is reducing our excessive dependence on the churches. I have touched on several areas in which change can be implemented, including the simple step of improving the front end of the Department's website. I wish the Minister well in her work.

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