NEW SANCTIONS for schools with discriminatory enrolment policies are to be considered by Minister for Education Mary Hanafin.
However, she has ruled out the withdrawal of State funding for schools that exclude special needs, foreign nationals and Travellers.
The Minister was responding to the department’s audit of almost 2,000 schools – details of which appeared in yesterday’s Irish Times. It showed that some schools were excluding minorities.
School management bodies, teacher unions and other education groups have until early June to submit ideas for revised enrolment policies.
Ms Hanafin has asked the education partners to consider a range of issues including:
the need to provide information to parents about their rights should a school refuse to enrol their child;
how written enrolment policies of schools can be used to exclude pupils (for example, enrolling children from birth or giving preferential treatment to children of past pupils, thereby putting the children of immigrants, described in the audit as “newcomers”, at a disadvantage);
better co-operation between schools in order to address enrolment anomalies;
proposals to allow the Minister to intervene in local admissions where inter-school co-operation is not achieved.
Interviewed on RTÉ’s News at One, the Minister said the audit exposed how some schools were refusing to accept their responsibilities. Some, she said, were employing subtle practices to exclude special needs pupils, newcomers and Travellers.
Welcoming the audit, the ASTI said all schools should be inclusive and should welcome a diverse cohort of pupils.
John White, ASTI general secretary, pointed to a motion adopted by the union at its conference this year. This said each school should cater for students with special needs in its catchment area, in order to stop the practice of “cherrypicking” students. It would also mean some schools would no longer have to accommodate a disproportionate number of students with special education needs.