Minister for Education Mary Hanafin has ordered an audit of school-enrolment policies amid increasing concern that some are being used to exclude special needs and foreign national students.
The audit, which is being conducted in both primary and second-level schools, is already under way.
Ms Hanafin stressed yesterday that she would not accept a situation where some schools were not accepting their responsibility to special needs or foreign national students.
Figures published by The Irish Times last year indicated how special needs provision in Dublin schools was largely concentrated in disadvantaged areas. Several fee-paying schools in the city had virtually no provision for special needs pupils.
The Minister said she was dismayed to learn in the course of a recent visit to a primary school how all pupils with special needs were heading to the same second-level school.
Some schools were discouraging parents of children with special needs. She said parents were being told gently to take their child elsewhere or schools would cite lack of teaching personnel despite the fourfold increase in special needs provision in recent years.
"What is happening is insidious. Schools are saying we are not rejecting you. We are telling you to go to another place."
The Minister said she would use the results of the audit to make schools more aware of their responsibilities.
At this stage her priority was to encourage schools to adopt a more enlightened approach, and she did not envisage new legislation on school-enrolment policies in the short term. "I am very slow to impose enrolment policies," she said.
Ms Hanafin was speaking at the annual conference of the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals (NAPD), the group which represents second-level principals.
Some 500 delegates warmly received the Minister. In a warm tribute, NAPD president Clive Byrne called her a "visionary Minister" who has achieved real progress.
Turning to the Minister, he said: "Your commitment to affirm us at the coalface in education is very much appreciated."
However, he was critical of the manner in which school principals were being asked to take on new legal and other responsibilities without receiving the secretarial and technical back-up they needed.
In his keynote address Dr Garret FitzGerald said schools and teachers have an increased role in the moral guidance of young people, particularly since the decline in the influence of the Catholic Church.
