THE VARIOUS education partners - including the school management bodies - are preparing their submissions to the Department of Education's review of school enrolment policies. The department has asked the partners to respond by June 8th to its recently published audit of some 1,900 schools at primary and post-primary level.
Although this showed no system-wide discrimination, it did highlight how provision for special needs, foreign nationals and Travellers was often left to community and comprehensive schools at post-primary level. It showed how in a southern region, 27 per cent of students in one community school had special needs, compared with fewer than 5 per cent in neighbouring secondary schools.
The same pattern was evident when it comes to the children of immigrants. In one Dublin vocational school, some 26 per cent of students were in this category, compared to 0.1 per cent in an adjoining girls' secondary school. The overall pattern was healthier at primary level where Catholic schools operated fair and inclusive admission policies.
The audit of enrolment policies was pushed through by former education minister Mary Hanafin largely in response to pressure from the Teachers' Union of Ireland which has highlighted the increasingly two-tiered nature of education at second level. The audit was the most comprehensive yet within the education system but, curiously, it did not examine enrolment policies among the 50-plus fee-paying schools which have faced allegations of discrimination and elitism.
The audit was also extraordinarily polite in tone; offending schools were not identified by name and only general regions (the south, the mid west etc) were given. But why should schools - fee-paying and otherwise - be afforded this protection? All are in receipt of State funds. All have a legal, as well as a moral responsibility, to operate inclusive admission policies. Why should they not be named and shamed?
On foot of the submissions from the education partners, new Minister for Education Batt O'Keeffe will frame the department's response to the audit. In doing so, he must signal his total intolerance of educational apartheid, including his opposition to schools using subtle practices such as admission policies which favour past pupils or siblings, to exclude newcomer children. The Minister's challenge is to ensure that all schools respect the spirit as well as the letter of the law in their admission policies.