Naoise Ó Cearúil (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)

One frustration of school principals as well is that when the Department comes out looking for more spaces, it looks at communal spaces or an office and tries to say they could be classrooms. We have to protect those communal spaces for students as well. Whenever I speak in this Chamber, I always try to come with solutions rather than just raising issues all the time. I have some solutions that I would like the Tánaiste to take back to the Minister. As I mentioned, one is the capacity planning linked to demographics, particularly in the commuter area. A lot of us living in the commuter area experience it. The second is to introduce preference ranking, particularly on that admissions system, with a first, second and third preference. Third is to harmonise admissions criteria. We see different criteria for admissions policies in schools, which can really complicate admissions to most secondary schools and, indeed, primary education as well. There is also the issue of transparent oversubscription management. Anonymised data on applications, offers and waiting lists for each school should be published in order that we can know more. Finally, we need a feedback loop on the likes of this pilot and others to report on their success and, indeed, opportunities and challenges from that.

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