Jim Daly (Cork South West, Fine Gael)
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510. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of complaints her Department receives each year from parents of children attending primary school; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [41644/15]

Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour)
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Under the Education Act, 1998, legally, all schools are managed by the school Board of Management, on behalf of the school patrons or trustees or Education and Training Board. It is the management authority that employs the school's teachers and other staff members. The school principal manages the school on a day-to-day basis.

As my Department has no role in the employment of staff in schools or schools' day-to-day management, a complaint about the child's school and its staff is proper to the school itself.

Accordingly, whereas my Department provides funding and policy direction for schools, my Department does not have the power to instruct schools to follow a particular course of action in regard to individual complaint cases. In dealing with complaints, the Department's role is to provide advice to parents and students on the operation of schools' complaints procedures and to clarify for parents and pupils how grievances and complaints against schools can be progressed.

Complaints from parents are often received by phone, and across all sections of my Department. These are attended to contemporaneously in detail by telephone and are not logged. It is therefore not possible to provide data in any accurate format as to how many complaints from parents of children attending primary school have been received in the Department.

Additionally, the Office of the Ombudsman for Children may independently investigate complaints relating to the administrative actions of a school recognised by the Department of Education and Skills, provided the parent has firstly and fully followed the school's complaints procedures. The key criterion for any intervention by the Ombudsman for Children is that the administrative actions of a school has, or may have, adversely affected the child.

The Deputy is also aware that it is my intention to amend Section 28 of the Education Act 1998 to require every school to have a Parent and Student Charter according to principles set down in legislation that will set a national standard. Changing how schools engage with, listen and respond to parent concerns will be an important part of a Charter. A core objective of the Charter will be to shift away from reacting to problems only after they give rise to grievances. Instead the emphasis will be on improving the day-to-day experience students and their parents can expect from schools so that grievances do not arise at all or are resolved quickly and informally, and as a result having to resort to a formal grievance process should be much reduced.

I plan to have this change introduced during the passage of the Education (Admission to Schools) Bill 2015.