Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)

I was pleased to be in a position to officially launch the new online survey for our primary schools today. This essentially enables parents and guardians of children in primary school, and of those who will attend primary school, and the teachers, staff and boards of management in our primary schools, to take part in a survey. There were three very simple and straightforward questions in the survey: whether people want their school be single sex or co-educational; whether they want their child or children to be taught through the medium of English or Irish; and whether they want their school to have a denominational or multidenominational ethos or religious or non-religious patronage.

The whole objective of this survey is for the Department, for the first time, to get a clear understanding of what it is that parents want in education provision for their children. The curriculum is the same and is taught the same irrespective of what school they are in, but for all of the other areas I mentioned, we have not ever had a survey of this kind where we are surveying parents of over 800,000 young people. It is important we get that information.

To give some context, the number of young people in co-educational schools is at 90%. Only 10% are same-sex schools, so that question perhaps only applies to a smaller number of people. The number of young people in our schools who are being taught through the medium of Irish is at 8%, so 92% are being taught through the medium of English. Do we want to see a greater increase or level of provision for our Gaelscoileanna? That will, hopefully, support and complement the two new strategies I am launching later this week. In relation to patronage, 95% of our schools have a religious ethos. The majority are Catholic in ethos, others are Church of Ireland, there are a small number of other schools and 5% are multi-denominational. Do we have a desire and demand from parents to provide more diverse opportunities for different types of patronages?

It is very important that as many people as possible take this survey. I encourage, within the Deputy's constituency and others, parents and guardians to take this survey so we get a clearer picture. While there are not the same percentages for post-primary schools - it is about 50:50 at the moment on patronage between multidenominational and denominational - there is potentially an opportunity after this survey to see whether there is demand in certain areas, where there is maybe a more skewed percentage, to do something similar or to ask those questions of parents as well.

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