David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Josepha Madigan, for attending to take this matter. I am back again, as this is my third or fourth time dealing with the issue. The pressure on schools in east Cork again this year is very high. There are long waiting lists in all of the schools and this has been the case for many years, for many reasons. It has led to a situation where parents are compelled to apply to more than one school. In east Cork, Carrigtwohill and Midleton are 3 km or 4 km apart and there are four second-level schools in Midleton and two in Carrigtwohill.

The Minister of State is an accomplished legal person and I understand the Leas-Cheann Comhairle is an accomplished barrister, so they might be able to help me with this issue. When an application is made on behalf of a child to attend a school and that child is put on a waiting list, that is tantamount to a refusal. The next step is to appeal that to the board of management. If that is refused, under section 29 of the Education Act it goes to the Minister and the Department. If that is refused, the child is entitled to school transport to the next nearest school. This is challenging and because parents do not know this information, they apply to many different schools. Eventually, they are accepted in one, which may not be the nearest school. When they look for school transport, they are asked for the paperwork to show they have been refused in the nearest school, that they appealed it to the board and were refused, and that they appealed it to the Minister and were refused, so that, now, they can be given school transport. Parents do not know this. The child is then on the concessionary list for spare seats on a bus, which may appear or not.

This is madness. The stress and strain on children and parents trying to access places is the same every year. What I am suggesting to the Minister for the third or fourth time is that, in this particular case, where there are six schools in very close proximity, we designate that area as one education centre, and the problem is sorted regarding school transport. I understand the Minister can do it with one stroke of a pen.

I acknowledge that a review is ongoing. The review of school transport started in October 2019 but I understand it still has not been completed and that it was only in January of this year that it went for public consultation. We are waiting for this review. In the interim, I and my colleagues are facing this problem every year where children have to wait and wait, and the waiting lists are long again this year.

I hope the people in the Department are listening to me, and maybe they are not - I do not know. I ask the Minister to look at this solution. It is a simple solution and it would take a lot of pressure off principals, Bus Éireann, parents and children, and it will not cost a whole lot at the end of the day. If there are four schools in one town and the child applies to the nearest school, technically, we can get out a tape measure to find that the nearest school is a couple of hundred yards away from the next nearest school.

If we wanted to be really pedantic about it, we could say a person should go to that school and not the other school even though they are in the same town. I suggest moving that on a little further by taking two adjacent towns a couple of kilometres apart, with four secondary schools in one and two in the other, and making that one education centre. That solves many problems for many people and makes it very simple. I look forward to the Minister of State's response to this.

We are facing long waiting lists in east Cork again this year. The Minister, Taoiseach, school principals, Deputy O'Connor and I met last year to discuss this issue. That will tell the Minister of State how serious this is. It was unprecedented. It was sorted last year by the provision of extra places but we are back this year with the same scenario. What is going on as well, of course, is that parents apply to more than one school and therefore there are long waiting lists. There is a modelin County Limerick where they have a kind of central applications office for secondary schools and that helps. Perhaps that is something the Minister of State might also consider in cases such as this.

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