Cog Notes: Crude lobbying over school admissions policy may prove effective
March 3, 2015
Angry middle-class parents have been bombarding Jan O’Sullivan with letters denouncing plans to regulate admissions policies.
In a two-month period before Christmas, the Minister for Education received more than 50 complaints about provisions in the Education (Admission to Schools) Bill that would limit the number of places schools could reserve for children of past pupils.The correspondence, released under the Freedom of Information Act, included letters dictated by the past-pupil unions of fee-paying schools in which the provisions are described as “nothing short of ideologically motivated vandalism of our education sector”.
Included are letters from Minister of State Simon Harris and Minister for Jobs Richard Bruton, passing on constituents’ concerns.
The road to adulthood: the burden of debt will be carried by our young generation into their adult lives, yet the social transfers to them have declined to a much greater extent than to other groups.
Fellow Fine Gael TDs Mary Mitchell O’Connor and Alan Shatter were also targeted with letters. One parent wrote: “In the last election when I voted Fine Gael, never did I imagine that the junior party of the Coalition would be allowed ride roughshod over the traditional values of Fine Gael voters.”
It’s not subtle, but this lobbying could prove effective in determining the Bill’s final wording.
