Social class, race, disability - discrimination on many grounds is still rife in Irish education. Secondary school students say they have no input into decisions that affect them. Is inequality set to remain a constant?

What is equality in education? Or rather, who defines inequality? The bottom line is legislation. In Dublin's Grafton Street last week, a group of secondary school boys tried to demonstrate their own bottom line by wearing girls' school skirts. Daire Hickey of the Union of Secondary Students, who organised the protest, says that secondary school students should have a right to participate in the formation of the curriculum and the running of schools.

While participation is a significant issue in equality terms, participation in schools by students is not covered under legislation. So while male students may show their legs, they haven't got one to stand on.

However, Hickey does have a point. It is a fact that many secondary schools still insist that girls wear skirts - despite a ruling by the Equality Tribunal last year that a CERT trainee could not be compelled to wear a skirt. At the time, the Equality Authority saw the ruling as a clear signal to schools, although many did not get the message.

Niall Crowley, the chief executive of the Equality Authority, believes that schools have not yet geared up to prevent discrimination under the Equal Status Act 2000. Considering that cases of alleged discrimination more than doubled between 2001 and 2002, this appears to be the case.

Equality is about far more than school uniforms: if you are physically or mentally unwell during an exam period, does your school or college have the right to insist that you take the exam anyway? Not at all, according to the casework of the Equality Authority (see panel).

Most cases are brought to the authority on the grounds of disability - which has a wide interpretation. It includes depression and pregnancy, for example. But equality is about even more than this: it's also about access to education in the first place.

If you grow up in a middle or upper-middle class family in a posh area like Foxrock, Dublin, the chances that you will go on to third level are at least 90 per cent - and possibly as high as 97 per cent. If you live in an urban estate in north-west Dublin, you have only a 13 per cent chance of getting to third level. A student's address has been a reliable predictor of future educational prospects for the past 40 years. Counties that produced the highest proportions of third-level students 40 years ago, continue to do so now.

So why hasn't this changed? Inequality is as much about socio-economic factors, as it is about gender and disability. A student's greatest disability could be the estate that he or she grew up on.

"When middle-class people in Ireland know that 97 per cent of their children will go to third level, then what is their motivation to change the situation?" asks Dr Ivor Goodson, an international expert on educational disadvantage. He admits that this is a "cynical" answer to a tough question, but there is some truth in it.

By the age of 22 months, educational inequality will already have taken its toll on a child. This means that tackling inequality has to start before primary school, says Goodson.

That was certainly the message from a recent conference, Why Dubliners Don't Do College, which was organised by Dublin Employment PACT.

If you want children to do the Leaving Cert and go on to third level, you have to start nurturing these aims in primary school.

The Minister for Education and Science, Mr Dempsey, has repeatedly stated that the issue of social inclusion and educational disadvantage are amongst his top priorities. Not finishing school is the most significant factor in keeping people in cycles of disadvantage, and it is a key indicator for subsequent difficulties such as long-term unemployment, poverty, homelessness, substance abuse and criminal activity.

Keeping people in school is difficult enough when they are from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, but it is even harder when children are refused access to school.

Children from the Traveller community can be refused admission to schools, a case of discrimination if ever there was one. The Equality Authority dealt with four such cases in 2002.

Access doesn't begin and end with admission, however. Equality of participation means that a school must make an effort to engage the student and keep the student in school with the appropriate goals and a satisfactory result at the end.

The quality of teaching is an equality issue. As Ted Fleming told the conference, teachers' communication skills must be sufficient to reach all students, not just those from the traditional middle-class backgrounds. Third-level teachers are one of the only professional groups who do not receive formal training for their job. Their qualifications relate to being experts in their fields, conducting research and publishing papers. But no one ever actually teaches them how to lecture.

Secondary students are making a similar point. They were insulted when the ASTI and TUI publicly criticised students and parents for falling standards of behaviour, without consulting the students themselves. If they had been asked, secondary students would have blamed behaviour problems on inadequate, cold, damp and uncomfortable classrooms; on boring and authoritarian teaching and on irrelevant curricula. Students were being blamed unfairly, the Union of Secondary Students argued.

Which brings us back, in a way, to boys wearing skirts. Secondary students want more of a say in their education. Will they get it? Not under equality legislation, they won't. The only solution is a root and branch re-think of secondary education itself and new legislation to require the involvement of students in the formation of the educational process.

This may actually be the long-term answer to keeping secondary students interested in staying in school, thereby breaking the cycle of disadvantage.