Sir, – I am delighted to learn from the pages of your newspaper that the Department of Education has finally begun to gather data on oversubscription in schools (News, January 9th). Such data would have been useful in the debate regarding the role of religion in school admissions, a debate which generated considerable public commentary, a consultation process, two hearings of the Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills and a Labour private member’s Bill, all without a scrap of hard data.
At the time, the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association (CPSMA) called for an independent comprehensive, national, evidence-based survey of this issue to ensure that policy would be based on evidence not anecdote. The minister at the time did not seem to share our commitment to evidence-based policymaking, so we conducted a survey ourselves. The survey confirmed that oversubscription impacted only a very small number of Catholic schools, and that where Catholic schools were oversubscribed all of the schools in the area tended to be oversubscribed. Furthermore the survey showed that only 1.2 per cent of unsuccessful applications to enrol in a Catholic school were due to a lack of a baptismal certificate, hardly the “most serious issue” in admissions that campaigners claimed it to be.
While I have no doubt that a higher percentage of non-faith schools are oversubscribed, I would point out that one should not confuse applications with actual demand.
Your report highlights that the bishops identified the inability of schools to prioritise Catholic pupils in cases of oversubscription as a potential barrier to reconfiguration. What the bishops have proposed is that in an parish where the church has handed over a school to the State that the remaining schools in the parish be allowed to prioritise Catholic pupils if the schools of the parish are oversubscribed.
The bishops’ proposal, far from “holding the State hostage”, is a modest and helpful proposal designed to address the legitimate concerns of parents who want a Catholic education for their children in their own local community and to facilitate the process of reconfiguration. – Yours, etc,
SEAMUS MULCONRY,
General Secretary,
Catholic Primary
Schools Management
Association,
Maynooth,
Co Kildare.