Warning over rules on school enrolment

Plans to give legal backing to new rules on enrolment will impose unnecessary restrictions on the majority of secondary schools, management representatives have warned Education Minister Ruairi Quinn.

He is to publish laws soon that would allow him to impose rules on schools’ enrolment policies, rather than just guidelines, for the first time. The regulations would, among other things, ban schools from charging fees just to apply for a school place, operating first-come first-served waiting lists that might disadvantage newcomers to an area, or giving priority to children of past pupils.

He told the conference of the Joint Managerial Body (JMB), which represents more than half the country’s 730 second-level schools, that the current system is not satisfactory.

“It’s not fair and it’s not transparent, but there will be consultation, open and transparent all the way,” he said.

Mr Quinn was responding to JMB concerns that the issue is not sufficient to warrant legislation that will impose a burden on the 80% of schools that are compliant and which enrol all applicants for places.

Parents of a child refused enrolment can appeal under the 1998 Education Act to a committee convened by the Department of Education, to determine if the school complied with its own policies. There were more than 300 such appeals against primary and second level schools in 2009, but that dropped to 244 last year.

The planned law is expected to provide for a more localised appeals process but JMB general secretary Ferdia Kelly said the issue could be addressed without legislation, the requirement for which he described as “mind-boggling”.

“When we engage in the media on this subject, you would imagine the issue of enrolment problems is widespread out there, but I think that is an utterly false impression,” he said.

Mr Kelly said 80% of schools enrol all applicants and the remaining 20% that are over-subscribed must have an enrolment policy in accordance with existing education and equality laws, which must also be freely available and transparent.

Mr Quinn expects to publish within weeks the heads of a bill and the regulations he proposes would allow him to introduce on the processes schools should undertake for enrolment and prescribe what they may not include in their policies.

He said the Oireacthas education committee will be entitled to receive submissions and hold hearings from JMB or other inter-ested parties on the proposed regulations, with their recommendations influencing the final bill.

Rather than strict rules governing how schools enrol students, however, the JMB favours revised guidelines to be agreed with the department, parents’ groups and education partners.

Mr Kelly said: “If you have 150 applicants for 100 places, there will be 50 children disappointed, one way or another. It might be a different 50 if the rules change, but they should still have recourse to an appeal system that is effective and not cumbersome for parents or schools.”