Eoghan Murphy (Dublin South East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I do not want to labour my point because it is straightforward and I am conscious that it is not within the remit of the Minister for Finance. I have a problem in my constituency which probably exists in many constituencies. I am sure that Deputy Kevin Humphreys, who is present, gets the same phone calls as I get about the enrolment process in primary schools. I received a telephone call a few evenings ago from a young mother whose daughter is due to start school in September. She is worried sick because the child has not yet been offered a place. There are plenty of very good primary schools in the constituency. The problem is that the child has been on a waiting list since she was five weeks old. There is a problem in the system. One of the schools told the mother that it would not take her child because the mother does not speak Irish well enough. Another school refused her on religious grounds. She could not get into a third because it is so popular. Then the parents thought that if they could put the money together with help from their parents they might get the child into a fee-paying school but it turned out that she could not get in there. When I say the child was refused I mean that she was put on waiting lists but she was so far down that the schools told the parents informally not to hold their breath.

I have had this conversation many times with parents but never in September which makes me believe that children get school places eventually and not always in their locality. There is a real problem in the system and we need to address it in a comprehensive way because it causes worry for families. Parents then put their children's names on many lists to be sure of getting into a school, which is understandable. The schools are not sure how many pupils are coming in the following September so they cannot plan ahead. The system is inefficient and is wasting money and causing unnecessary stress in the community for many young parents and their families.

I will be interested to hear the plans of the Minister for Education and Skills and when we will see them. This week we heard proposals from the Irish Primary Principals Association to address this problem. They talked about a centralised web-based system with an agreed deadline for applications for primary schools and an agreed response time from those primary schools telling parents whether the child had been accepted. Parents would rank the schools by preference and hopefully in a fair system children would get into schools that way and everyone would know in plenty of time where the child would be going to school and come September the schools would know how many pupils they would have. That in turn would affect class size and teacher allocations. I am not advocating the idea as a whole. I do not think the Department should be given power but there is a more efficient community-based way to approach this problem and I will be interested hear the views of the Minister for Education and Skills on the issue.

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