Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent)
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155. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills her plans to address the antiquated categorisation of children in the ethnic or cultural background group within the primary online database form; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [16080/15]

Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour)
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My Department feels that the question used to collect data on ethnic or cultural background should be harmonized across all the education partners and other bodies who collect this type of information. As the CSO is the National Statistical Office, we are taking our lead from them and we have used the categories that they used for Ethnic or cultural background on the 2011 Census of Population. The Statistics Section of the Department met with the CSO's Census of Population Division to discuss concerns around this question. The CSO accept that the variant of the ethnicity question on the 2016 census may fall short of what could be expected in today's multi-racial Ireland. Given the no-change' census approach being adopted for Census of Population 2016 it is not possible to change the CSO question at this stage. However the CSO has indicated that it is considering holding a seminar this year to examine how the data in this area can be improved from the point of view of maximising the number of write-in responses to increase the variety of ethnic descriptions captured, the classification system used, and also looking at the nationality vs. citizenship issue and examining generally how the outputs from the census can be improved in this important area. The Department of Education and Skills will be participating in this seminar.