An audit of enrolment policies published by the Department of Education has found that special needs students, newcomers and Travellers are mostly accommodated in local vocational or community schools.

The audit, which covered 1,572 secondary and 426 primary schools, found that many schools use restrictive enrolment policies to discriminate against students recently arrived in the country.

And while not naming individual schools, it found that the education of Travellers, newcomers and special needs students fell largely to local vocational or community schools.

As an example, the report cited one community school in the south where 27% of pupils had special needs, compared to just 5% in the neighbouring school.

In one Dublin vocational school, 26% of students were described as “newcomers” or the children of immigrants, compared to 0.1% in a school next door.

In another community school, 45% of pupils had special needs while two community schools close by had about 3% each of special needs students.

Ms Hanafin yesterday warned that "by law, every school in their enrolment policy must be inclusive". However, she admitted that those who did not abide by this law would not be punished.

"The only way the department can penalise is to withdraw money from schools and I don’t think that would be possible."

Ms Hanafin said she was examining options on how to overcome the problem, and one area that needed change was school enrolment policies.

“If a school says you should really register from birth and they hold very long waiting lists, or they give priority to sons, grandsons and nephews and then work on a first-come, first-served basis, that basically means anybody who came to the country in the past few years would have no hope of getting into that school, so they’re automatically being excluded.”

The possibility of appointing regional admission officers was also being examined, she said.

“Parents need to have a lot more information about their rights. They do have rights to appeal if a school refuses to enrol their child. While schools are obliged to give that information to parents, I’m not satisfied that is happening,” said the minister.

Education spokesperson Ruairi Quinn said the report was a “very serious indictment of the minister’s management of the secondary school system.”  Any action now from the minister was coming too late, he said. (Source: Irish Examiner)