Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for coming to the Seanad. I welcome the Bill, which I support. It seeks to secure, through student and parent charters, the greater involvement of all stakeholders in school communities in the collaborative setting of rules and procedures for the running of schools.This is a good thing and is welcome. I strongly believe that students and parents need to feel part of setting the agenda and direction of this area, as they will be most impacted by the final product.

I welcome the requirements placed on boards of management for individual schools to consult with groups such as staff, students and parents when developing the charter and that the Minister must consult with a wide group of education stakeholders as he or she develops the guidelines for the charter. It is also welcome that the grievances within schools, if not resolved at school level, can be taken to the Minister and that he or she has the power to compel and give directions to schools to resolve the issues.

These provisions are welcome but it is an extraordinary shame that although the Minister for Education and Skills has had powers under section 28 of the Education Act to prescribe procedures to resolve grievances in schools for more than 20 years, they have never been used. It does not bode well that the only relevant statutory provisions in this area have never been used by successive Governments. Can the Minister assure the House that his Government and Department will not adopt a similar approach to the provisions of this Bill, which put a national structure on the resolution of issues and grievances? I hope that he will be more proactive in using his powers under the proposed Act and I ask him to give me such an assurance.

It has taken a long time for today's Bill to reach this Stage. Over time, the Bill has been altered arising from a commitment in the programme for Government. The then Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Bruton, published a draft scheme of the Bill in December 2016, at which point it was sent for pre-legislative scrutiny to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Education and Skills, of which I am a member. In June 2016, the then Deputy but now Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly, introduced a Private Members' Bill called the Education (Amendment) Bill 2015, which sought to establish an office of ombudsman for education to deal with complaints and grievances. As a result of the similarity between the two Bills, the committee agreed to scrutinise them simultaneously and held hearings that were attended by various stakeholders to hear their views on both Bills.

As a result of the structure of the process, we chose to deal with the two Bills. We then decided that it would be appropriate to recommend our preferred Bill. As a committee, we recognised the merits of both approaches, that is, a student and parent charter that is supported by a national statutory guidelines, as well as the setting up of a new ombudsman for education that would deal with these issues professionally and on a full-time basis. We ended up recommending that the Government legislation was our preferred option. I must say that I agreed to support the Government legislation at the time because heads 6 and 7 of the draft scheme contained quite a significant proposal to expand the powers and investigation capacity of the Ombudsman for Children. Under head 6, a board of management would be required to consider any recommendations or observations for the ombudsman. Furthermore, the ombudsman would have been able to forward any recommendations to the Minister, who could then direct the board to comply with the ombudsman's recommendation. This is a very considerable expansion of the powers envisaged for the Ombudsman for Children, who has often complained about the lack of engagement by schools in terms of queries from the office, and it was very welcome to see.

Head 7 of the draft scheme proposed an amendment to the Ombudsman for Children Act 2002, which would have changed the legislation quite significantly in two ways. The first was with a provision that is mirrored in section 10 of the Bill before Members, namely, a change of the investigative procedures to reflect the changes made in this Act. However, there was a second part of the 2016 version, which is notably absent from this Bill. The current position in the 2002 Act is that the ombudsman can only investigate a school once the procedures set out to deal with the complaints and grievances have been dealt with. That means a student or parent must have exhausted every avenue before an ombudsman can step in. The 2016 draft deleted the provision that required this to happen, which would have allowed the ombudsman to step in much earlier in the process and to play a far more active and proactive role in resolving complaints and grievances. The second part from the 2016 draft clearly and notably has been omitted from the Bill before us. I am sure the Minister can see the problem. In 2017, I was a member of the Joint Committee on Education and Skills. At that time I was happy to vote against a legislative route that would have started a new ombudsman for education because in the Education (Student and Parent Charter) Bill that we also considered, there were two strong provisions that proposed a more active and robust role for the existing Ombudsman for Children. Two years have elapsed since the provisions were proposed. They were the main deciding factor in my lending my support to the charter Bill but they have disappeared without a proper explanation. It is deeply unfair to ask a committee to make a judgment on the Bill when it contained significant and strong provisions to achieve its policy aims only to then drop them when the Bill is introduced to the House, especially when it was those absent provisions that garnered my support in the first place.

I strongly feel that the Ombudsman for Children needs to play a strong and proactive oversight and regulatory role in this area. Without the two exceptions from the 2016 draft scheme, that is impossible under this Bill. The current section 10 simply changes a legislative reference in the 2002 Act. It proposes no new role for the Ombudsman for Children, a fact which was explicitly set out in the briefing that the Department circulated to Senators this week. Why have these useful and worthwhile sections that expanded the role of the ombudsman been dropped over the past two years?

I read the Bill's digest that was prepared by the Oireachtas Library and Research Service, which provides the departmental response to the absence of these two sections, one of which is wholly inadequate. The Department claimed that there were concerns about head 7 being inconsistent with the existing 2002 Act. Of course it is inconsistent, as the Government proposed a deliberate expansion of the role. This cannot have been a surprise. There was no explanation offered in respect of head 7, merely a statement that an alternative approach was taken, which is not good enough. Why have the sections been dropped? They were the heart of the oversight mechanism of the 2016 draft heads. I need a proper explanation and if that is not forthcoming, I will table an amendment on Committee Stage to reinstate them.

Students and parents need the option of recourse. If not the board of management, then the Minister, with the Ombudsman for Children, is an obvious choice. The Bill has been significantly watered down.

We also noticed the acknowledgement of voluntary contributions as an element within the legislation. We are in agreement with Sinn Féin in terms of amendments on that area too. I urge the Minister to consider the points that I have set out.