Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I also extend my sympathies to the Minister, Deputy Burke, on the passing of his dear mother.

I ask that the Minister for Education comes to the House for a debate about the social, personal and health education, SPHE, syllabus and how it interacts with schools' child protection obligations and our obligations under the law. We did some child protection very well in this country about a decade ago. Thankfully, we have very robust child protection procedures in schools dating from 2017. These mandatory school procedures are informed, among other things, by awareness of the vulnerability of children around sexual matters, the capacity for grooming and the inability of a child to consent. The procedures clearly spell out what sexual exploitation is and how it can link to pornography and sexually explicit material. These procedures, importantly, precede in time the recent push to prematurely sexualise young people through school curricula. They precede the queer theory and gender theory-laden SPHE syllabi, which seek to disrupt dominant and normalising binaries, pretending that such binaries and norms are oppressive. These child protection procedures precede the worrying whistleblower evidence from an SPHE teacher concerned by recent Department of Education-funded training courses delivered in DCU, in part by academics sold on queer theory and gender identity ideology. Frankly, it featured such toxic and desensitising material, according to what I saw.

Despite plentiful alerts, indeed thousands, delivered by parents to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, NCCA, during the consultation and design phase of the SPHE curriculum, the NCCA pushed ahead with a reductive syllabus inspired by hedonism under the guise of inclusiveness. Even the ASTI recently proposed to its teachers that they should not teach an SPHE programme if they do not feel confident to do so. That is a welcome but insufficient response.

I call on patrons and boards of management in all schools to subject, immediately, the new NCCA SPHE syllabus content and methodology to a full, children-first audit, as is their duty. School boards of management cannot escape the duty to engage in full child protection and risk assessment. That includes anything that is being pushed at them by the State or its minions or agents forming syllabi. Examine the content of textbooks and resource material in the context of children's vulnerability. People should insist to their schools, in writing, if necessary, that this is done. The Minister should now sack or replace the board of the NCCA for its disregard of parental sensitivities. Despite the constantly expressed steady groundswell of concerns over recent years, the NCCA has created an unforgivable mess and needs to be made publicly answerable. There can be no hiding places. The Minister for Education needs to stop covering for educational incompetence.