Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I am very grateful to the Ceann Comhairle for the opportunity to raise with the Minister for Education and Skills the need for him to provide an update on and to outline the provisions which have been put in place to provide additional school places in Greystones, Kilcoole and Delgany in County Wicklow.

We have a recurring problem in Greystones and in the wider Greystones area where in the run-up to September, there is a scramble for school places. Parents who have been very dutiful and have put their child's name on a list in accordance with the right protocols and timeframes find themselves not knowing whether their child will have a school place in the school of their choice and in the school with the ethos of their choice as is their right as parents. In some cases, they do not know whether their child will have a place in any school. As the Minister can imagine, this is causing huge worry and stress. I have dealt with this issue each September during my time in this House and before that. It is a recurring issue that needs to be addressed.

In fairness to the Minister and his Department, extra classrooms were provided for St. Laurence's national school, St. Patrick's national school and St. Kevin's national school. However what is happening is that we are falling into the sticking plaster solution where every year the Department meets the eight representatives of the eight schools in that catchment area. The principals and the boards of management will acknowledge that the Department has been very helpful in trying to provide temporary solutions but they are only solutions to get them to the following September.

We need to engage in more long-term planning and my colleagues at local level - members of Wicklow County Council and members of the former Greystones Town Council - have expressed this concern to the Minister and to his Department. We need a longer-term solution. This is not a reflection on the Minister, who I have always found to be very helpful and forthcoming with information, but the answers to parliamentary questions I have submitted and which have been answered in the Minister's name have been less than forthcoming and have been mealy-mouthed. I submitted a parliamentary question on this issue on 7 May 2014, Question No. 96, but I was not satisfied with the answer which provided me with no information. I submitted another question three weeks later, Question No. 236 on 27 May 2014, asking a series of specific questions. The words matter and I do not just include them to make the question look long. Most of the elements of the question were ignored. My office was told by civil servants in the Minister's Department to stop contacting them as it would not help resolve the matter.

As a public representative, Member of Dáil Éireann and a supporter of this Government, I have been inundated with requests from worried parents - neighbours and friends in our community - wanting to know if their child will have a school place. There should be a better system in place to engage with parents and provide information. No parent should have to go to his or her TD to find out what the situation is in regard to a school place, but if he or she does, the TD should be able to find that information quite easily. Will the Department look at some sort of collaborative role in regard to making information publicly available on websites in terms of the number of places provided within a catchment area vis-à-visthe number of children expected to need to a school place this year? When I ask questions about what action is being taken and when the review will be complete, it would be helpful if that information could be provided because some of the questions I am asking are also being asked by the local schools. We have to do better.

Ultimately, we need another school in Greystones, and I have written to the Minister about this.

The reason for that is because the existing schools simply do not have the space to expand adequately. Based on population figures, the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government has advised the area is to grow in population and we will have a population bulge in the future. We need a new school in the area of Greystones known as Charlesland. Will the Minister provide details on the situation that will arise in September and also take a longer term look to ensure we do not have the same problem again next year that has arisen in the past two to three years?

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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I will respond directly to what Deputy Harris said, which might be a bit more constructive. We have a growth in population that will not peak until 2026. The problem is aggravated in many areas, including the area to which Deputy Harris referred, for all the normal reasons, but it will take time to put a response in place to my satisfaction and that will require support and confidence from the educational partners. What is required is some form of co-ordinated regional planning at local authority level or education and training board level to see what resources exist and what can be utilised. While we have a system of forward planning, there has been a significant population increase in the area to which Deputy Harris referred and the growth is happening at a faster speed. Deputy Harris might talk to the local authorities on the matter, to his party’s councillors and, following the local elections, the new education and training boards.

The second issue relates to admissions policy and enrolment which is currently unsatisfactory. A total of 80% of schools have the accommodation to offer a place to parents who apply to the 3,200 primary schools and approximately 800 post-primary schools, but 20% are oversubscribed in terms of their capacity to offer a place. Added to that, there is no proper system of waiting list or regulations. I have a document on admissions policy in draft form which I hope to get finalised and to bring before the House. It was a consultative document which has already gone to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Education and Social Protection. The suggestion is that people who move within the country or come to the country for the first time are excluded from local schools because they are not in the know and they do not realise that in some cases when a child is born one must have his or her name put down on a waiting list for school X or Y. The policy of first come, first served seems like an objective and reasonable one without favouritism for parents seeking education for their children, but it does provide a very strong advantage to parents who live in a particular area who know that they have to register their child for primary school education in virtually the week the child is born, and even then there is no guarantee of a place. We have not even begun to tackle the issue of getting a child into a school whose ethos is one parents want. That is another issue that requires discussion.

I suggest to Deputy Harris that the Department is more than happy to liaise, and does liaise, with local authorities, but the way forward is to get the education and training boards, in conjunction with the Department and local authorities, to work together. In the coming weeks 12 members of the Kildare and Wicklow Education and Training Board will be nominated by the local councillors and there will be two staff members and five other representative members. That is the way forward in terms of planning and making sure that we are making the best use of the existing space in the educational infrastructure.

I do not wish to sound as if the Department has a grand plan to take over the private patronage role of the schools. It does not, but we must ensure co-ordinated planning that provides and ensures space is available. We are not in a position to do that as satisfactorily as we would like.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Minister for his response and for responding directly to the issues I raised. I have a problem with the official response that the Minister did not read in that the Department gave me a history lesson in terms of the places it did provide. The class spaces the Minister provided are very much appreciated but they have been taken. The schools have provided the Department with as much flexibility as they can within the existing campus sites in terms of accommodating additional students. I still do not know, but much more importantly, the parents of children in Greystones, Delgany and Kilcoole who do not have a place today still do not know whether they will have a place.

The line from the Department which has been frustrating me for some time is that the schools in the area are engaging with each other in the context of addressing enrolment demand for September 2014. Could we try to put some meat on what exactly that means? I would be extremely grateful if in the coming days somebody in the Department could liaise with me and the other Deputies for the Wicklow constituency to explain exactly where we are at, because this is a very time-sensitive situation as schools will shortly shut down for the summer and we must resolve the issue.

I also wish to refer to the need for an additional school or for an existing school to move to a larger site in the Charlesland area. That is something the Minister might ask his officials to examine. The Minister is bang on the money in terms of what we need to do at a local level. As part of local government reform, those whom we elect at local level must accept the responsibilities they have, but they must also be given more responsibilities in terms of ensuring there are adequate school places and sites and that there is a waiting list structure. It is not adequate to be told that the schools are still working on the issue because September 2014 is very nearly here and we need to be able to give clarity to parents as to whether their child will have a place in any school, in particular a place in a school of their choice. The Minister shares my view that plurality and a choice of ethos is important to parents as the primary educators of children in this country.

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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I will not comment specifically on Deputy Harris’s area because I am not as well informed as he is, but in some areas there is close co-operation between the various primary schools in order that people know who has applied and there is a certain amount of sharing of information. However, that is not always the case. In fact, at the other end of the spectrum one has schools beating the bushes trying to find children that they can bring into a smaller school to maintain their teacher numbers. Somewhere between those two extremes we must find a way forward that can take the stress away from parents. I refer primarily to primary school places. In some cases parents will not know for some time whether their four year old will get a place this September.

The situation is due in the first instance to massive growth in population numbers. A White Paper was published by the Department of Education and Skills in 1998 which said that the big task facing the primary school system in Ireland was managing the decline in population. We had fewer than 480,000 schoolchildren and all the projections were that the population would decline. We now have 525,000 and growing. That means we must find extra space. It also means building bigger schools. There is a certain reluctance among some to contemplate that. One can provide far more accommodation in a much more effective and economic way with a two stream or three stream school, which is 24 classes or more. Some people do not want to have their child in such a school or say that it was not the kind of school they attended. My primary function, and that of the Department, is to make sure that no parent is deprived of a school place in the first instance and preferably a school place of their choice. Providing the accommodation in the first instance must be a priority.