Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left)
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554. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the steps she will take for parents in relation to their children being in the catchment area for a junior school in Malahide, County Dublin, but excluded from the catchment area in relation to national schools, from second class onwards, and from secondary education; and the further steps she will take to resolve this. [8162/15]

Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour)
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It is the responsibility of the managerial authorities of all schools to implement an enrolment policy in accordance with the Education Act, 1998. The enrolment policy must be non-discriminatory and must be applied fairly in respect of all applicants.

This Department's main responsibility is to ensure that schools in an area can, between them, cater for all pupils seeking school places in the area. Parents have the right to choose which school to apply to and where the school has places available the pupil should be admitted. However, in schools where there are more applicants than places available a selection process may be necessary. This selection process and the enrolment policy on which it is based must be non-discriminatory and must be applied fairly in respect of all applicants. However, this may result in some pupils not obtaining a place in the school of their first choice.

Section 29 of the Education Act, 1998 provides for an appeal by a parent or guardian to the Secretary General of my Department, or in the case of an Educational Training Board (ETB) school to the ETB in the first instance, where a Board of Management of a school, or a person acting on behalf of the Board, refuses to enrol a student in a school, expels a student or suspends a student for 20 or more days in any school year.

The Educational Welfare Service of the Child and Family Agency (EWS) is the statutory agency which can assist parents who are experiencing difficulty in securing a school place for their child. The EWS can be contacted at 01-8738700.

For school planning purposes the country is divided into geographic districts known as feeder areas each with several primary schools feeding into a post-primary centre with one or more post-primary schools. These defined districts facilitate the orderly planning of school provision and accommodation needs.

The Deputy will be aware that Government gave approval in March last year for drafting the Education (Admission to Schools) Bill 2014. The bill is currently at an advanced stage of drafting and is on the Government legislative programme for publication early in the Spring/Summer session.

The objective of the Admissions to School Bill is to provide an over-arching framework to ensure that how schools decide on who is enrolled and who is refused a place in schools is more structured, fair and transparent. The framework also proposes a mechanism for ensuring that every child receives a school place.

A key objective in designing the framework is to create greater confidence for parents that the admission criteria laid down by schools are legitimate, reasonable and fair.