Despite appetite for change, the status quo remains in schools

The State asked hundreds of thousands of parents what they wanted for their children’s education, then abdicated its responsibility for any real reform

'In 2012, the Department of Education surveyed parents in more than 40 towns and districts and found enough demand for change in 28, yet by 2017 the department admitted the process had produced just 10 schools.' File picture 

Last winter, like thousands of other parents, I filled in the Department of Education’s primary school survey while bouncing my baby up and down in his carrier. It was the first time the State had asked every family with a young child what kind of primary school they wanted: Co-ed or single-sex, English or Irish-speaking, denominational or multi-denominational.

As a researcher and parent representative with the human rights campaign Education Equality, I cared most about the question on patronage.

I want my children to learn critically about all religions, not to be brought up in one by their school, so the fact that the department was asking at all felt significant. When I submitted my answers, I was optimistic that real and badly needed change would follow.

The national results, released in April, showed that four in 10 parents with children in a denominational school would prefer a multi-denominational one.

In some schools, it was seven in 10. Think about what that means — at every school gathering and chat at the school gates, there are parents who love their child’s school and its teachers but wish it didn’t have a religious ethos.

The results drew plenty of attention at the time, and for a few weeks it felt as though parents’ voices were finally part of the conversation. But since early summer, when schools received their individual results, the coverage has largely fallen away.

On November 30, the deadline passes for boards of management to tell the department whether they want to be among the first schools to act on those results. Schools received their reports in early June, in the last busy weeks before the summer holidays, and the original deadline was October 31.

We’ve heard almost nothing about how these consultations are going. The department calls this “a school-led process”, and when its own FAQ asks whether schools must hold a community meeting, it stops short of saying yes, noting only that one “may be particularly important” where results are close.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard that some schools with clear demand for change are running their own polls.

For many parents this brings to mind the Lisbon Treaty, which we rejected in 2008 and were asked to vote on again a year later.

These polls are likely to include only parents of children already enrolled, even though the department’s guidance says families of future pupils should also have their say.

Other schools may not have engaged their communities at all, but there’s no way to know, because there’s no requirement to report on how consultation was carried out.

It’s hard to have confidence in a process designed like this. Nearly half a million households were invited to take part, and more than 200,000 parents responded. Yet the decision rests with boards of management, whose deliberations are confidential and whose members may look nothing like those parents.

The minister has said plainly that the choice belongs to the patrons, so a school could record overwhelming support for change, do nothing and owe no one an explanation.

Previous calls for change 

We have been here before. In 2012, the Department surveyed parents in more than 40 towns and districts and found enough demand for change in 28, yet by 2017 the Department admitted the process had produced just 10 schools. That year, the Government set a target of 400 multi-denominational schools by 2030.

With four years to go, we are less than halfway there. Some schools that changed never held a vote, because a patron can transfer a school whenever it chooses.

Meanwhile, schools have moved from single-sex to co-educational without any suggestion that their identity was under threat. Even after a national survey of this scale, it would be surprising if more than a handful of schools divested.

And even if every school with a clear mandate changed tomorrow, most children in Ireland would still attend a denominational school.

Among them are children of other faiths and none, whose parents have exercised their constitutional right to opt them out of religious instruction. How many are there? Nobody knows.

When I asked the minister’s office this month whether any data is kept on these children, the reply was that arrangements are “a matter for the school concerned”, decided “having regard to local issues such as available space, supervision requirements” and how each school organises its classes.

In practice, that means a child given a book at the back of the room while prayers go on around them, sent to a corridor, or left to sit through weeks of preparation for a Communion they won’t be making.

That is a lot of time, and even under the new curriculum, religion gets about two hours a week, roughly twice the time given to science. That’s two hours these children could spend discovering, creating and learning to think critically.

Instead, they wait while their classmates are taught one faith’s answers to life’s biggest questions: Where we come from, what a family should look like, what happens when we die.

A year ago, the department committed to drawing up best-practice guidance for these children. Before that, the most we had was a 2014 paper of general observations, and now the latest reply says only that “work is ongoing.”

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The department talks often about inclusion, which was a central theme of the recent National Convention on Education.

But inclusion means a school where no child or family has to defend who they are, and a child who sits apart while classmates pray, or is asked in the yard why they aren’t making their Communion, is not included in any meaningful sense, however warm their school may be.

None of this should fall on teachers, many of whom are uneasy with it themselves. In a 2025 INTO survey, 57% of primary teachers said faith formation should not take place in schools, and 77% said preparing children for the sacraments was the job of the family or the parish, while just 4% said it was the school’s job.

The Catholic bishops have said they would like to move “as quickly as possible” towards schools whose ethos reflects what parents want, and the Church has been careful to appear fully engaged — but actions speak louder than words. Schools are one of the last places the Church still reaches most Irish families every week, through daily prayers, the Grow in Love programme, Masses, confession and Communion, and it’s hard to believe it will give that up willingly.

The State asked hundreds of thousands of parents what they wanted, then abdicated its responsibility for any real reform.

Over the next two weeks, parents, journalists and public representatives should be asking every school, every patron and the Minister herself about their plan for real and sustained change.

• Maedbh King, PhD is a researcher and parent representative at Education Equality.