It will be a year to the day this Saturday since the general election. One of the crucial areas that came up time and time again on the doors in Kildare North was the lack of social infrastructure keeping pace with the new houses being built. I am sure the Tánaiste has experienced this as well in his own constituency, the neighbouring constituency of Wicklow. What I would like to raise today is school admissions, particularly for secondary schools. In Maynooth, Celbridge, Leixlip, Clane, Kilcock, Naas, Prosperous and every town in the constituency, we have children in sixth class who have not been guaranteed a place in secondary school. They have applied to and are on waiting lists for numerous secondary schools. This is causing natural worry and fear, particularly running up to Christmas. No child in sixth class should be worrying about where they are going to school in September next year. It is clear to me that there is a lack of future planning and forecasting when it comes to school places in areas of high growth like north Kildare and indeed the Tánaiste's own constituency, where Greystones Community School has had a particular issue in terms of its expansion. I am thinking particularly of the principals who are trying to tackle this issue and find capacity. I have spoken with Siobhán McCauley, principal of Maynooth Community College, and Johnny Nevin, principal of Maynooth Post Primary, about trying to facilitate the amount of admissions they are getting. Naturally, it happens every single year. Time and again, the Department comes back with "increase enrolment". By increasing enrolment, we are essentially increasing class sizes when we have committed to reducing them. As well as that, we are looking at a capacity issue. These are two new schools, Maynooth Community College and Maynooth Post Primary. It was the largest investment by the State of €30 million at the time, with a capacity of 1,000 pupils per school, and it is far exceeding that. One method the former Minister for Education, Deputy McEntee, introduced, was a pilot scheme for admissions. I welcomed it at the time. I think it is a great idea in principle, a type of CAO process. Unfortunately, that has not worked in Celbridge. We have Celbridge Community School, Salesian College Celbridge and St. Wolstan's Community School. In those schools, the pilot scheme has not been working as intended. It has created extreme frustration, particularly when the ethos of the schools are different. Salesians' is an all-boys school, St. Wolstan's is an all-girls school and Celbridge Community School is a mixed school. We need to look at capacity planning linked to demographics, not just based on the census but particularly on cases where we know there are planning applications going through for 500 or 600 houses in locations, to ensure that we have the places at primary and secondary school.

Sentiment score: 0.09

One frustration of school principals as well is that when the Department comes out looking for more spaces, it looks at communal spaces or an office and tries to say they could be classrooms. We have to protect those communal spaces for students as well. Whenever I speak in this Chamber, I always try to come with solutions rather than just raising issues all the time. I have some solutions that I would like the Tánaiste to take back to the Minister. As I mentioned, one is the capacity planning linked to demographics, particularly in the commuter area. A lot of us living in the commuter area experience it. The second is to introduce preference ranking, particularly on that admissions system, with a first, second and third preference. Third is to harmonise admissions criteria. We see different criteria for admissions policies in schools, which can really complicate admissions to most secondary schools and, indeed, primary education as well. There is also the issue of transparent oversubscription management. Anonymised data on applications, offers and waiting lists for each school should be published in order that we can know more. Finally, we need a feedback loop on the likes of this pilot and others to report on their success and, indeed, opportunities and challenges from that.

Sentiment score: 0.21