Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

To be honest, I am worried about this legislation and what it is trying to achieve. In theory, the principles of having proper grievance procedures, having a charter for parents and students, having proper information that is available about how the school operates, its funding and where the funding goes, are not bad ideas. However, I worry that it essentially lets the Government off the hook and brings with it an internal focus, wherein the school board and the staff are held responsible for failings which are actually the failings of the Government. If you were to ask school communities - parents, teachers or, most importantly, pupils - what their list of priorities were and what rights they would like to have in terms of their education, I strongly suspect the sort of rights which are not going to be in this charter, because they are actually the responsibility of Government, would be the things they would be asking for.

They would be asking for the right to have class sizes that are not the highest in Europe and where the quality of education is seriously undermined by excessive class sizes. They would certainly be asking about the right to have a proper school building and not to be in a temporary building for years. They would ask about the right to proper equipment - computer equipment and other equipment and facilities in their school. They would ask for proper sports and recreational facilities, including sports halls and amenities. They would ask for the right to services where they need them. They would ask for the right to SNAs and the special education resources that they need. The might ask for the right to a properly-ventilated classroom. They might ask for the right of teachers to have funded professional development to deal with issues like special educational needs and emotional behaviours. They might ask for the right to have hot school meals. They might ask for the right to have free school transport and free school books. They might ask for the right not to have to fundraise in order to pay for basic things within the school, or be forced to make voluntary contributions to provide those things and spend huge amounts of time fundraising for things that, in fact, should be funded by the Department of Education and the Government.

They might ask for the right not to have religious patron bodies sell off their school facilities while the Department washes its hands of it, saying it has nothing to do with it because, even though it funds the schools in question, a religious school patron body can just sell off sports facilities, as has been done at Clonkeen secondary school. They might ask for the right not to be put through an archaic and stressful examination system such as the leaving certificate system, which dictates to a substantial degree their life chances, opportunities and choices, putting extraordinary stress on them and their parents. This system is unnecessary and archaic and should be done away with because it is simply a way of gatekeeping access to higher and further education, which should be a right in itself.

Those are some of the rights I suspect people would ask for. They are all rights that the Government should be obliged to grant. That is what the charter should include. I am not saying the other matters in the Bill are matters of inconsequence but all the focus is on internal responsibility for structures that exist. We have the Teaching Council to deal with grievance procedures and complaints against teachers. We have school boards of management, parent-teacher associations and so on. As even a Government Deputy said, most schools are doing what this Bill is requiring them to do anyway. Therefore, the problem is not teachers. By and large, we have fantastic teachers. The problem is not school staff or school secretaries. School secretaries were rightly mentioned earlier because the ability of a school to deliver on many internal matters concerning parents and teachers depends on them. Many of them have to sign on to the dole during the summer because the Government will not give them a proper contract of employment.

I worry about where this is going. Having spoken to several teachers, I have learned they are concerned. I suspect this is the reason for Deputy Gannon's reference to neoliberal models and so on. Even Deputy Ó Cathasaigh was alluding to these when he spoke about performance. The main concern has to be that, because of the removal of the responsibility the Department and Minister should have regarding school students and the placing of responsibility within schools' internal structures, schools will end up in a league table situation. That is a significant concern. The measure encourages competition and performance targets for schools. It pits schools against one another in meeting targets. Inevitably, if education is pushed in that direction, as it has been in England, where similar charters were set up very much according to a Tory neoliberal idea of pitting schools against one another in a competitive process, the schools that will lose out will be those that inevitably and invariably lose out, namely those in more disadvantaged areas catering for families with less income and that are less able to meet the demands or targets the charters oblige them to meet but which they do not have the resources to meet because they are not given them by central government. We are concerned about this, the logic behind it and where that logic leads. The Government should focus far more on giving people the right to a high-quality education, with minimum standards in class sizes, which should be substantially smaller than those we now have, with quality school buildings and without the shocking circumstances that certainly persist in many of the schools in my area. In my last minute or so, I will mention some of these circumstances.

We have a system in which it is recognised that an area needs a certain number of schools. There is a democratic process whereby people decide what patron body their school will have, be it Educate Together, a Gaelscoil or another. The school is recognised, yet school after school in my area does not know where it is going to be located.

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