Sir, - In Bristol a mother was brought to court following her 14-year-old son's persistent failure to go to school. As she works as a cleaner, she has to leave home to go to work at 4.30 every morning and so cannot be there to see her son gets out to school. The court decided that instead of imposing the £2,000 allowed for under the legislation, it would make a parenting order, requiring the mother to attend a three-month parenting course. A British newspaper covered this with a banner front-page headline: "Guilty of being a bad parent", and a close-up colour photograph of the mother (Daily Mail, July 13th).
Giving the court the option of making a parenting order rather than imposing a fine that a cleaner cannot afford is sensible. But the fact that the media are allowed to run a photograph of the mother and give her name alongside a headline claiming she is guilty of being a bad parent is, to say the least, not going to help her and her son sort out their difficulties. The mother in this case is separated from her husband and she and her children have had to move several times - both experiences that would disrupt settled attendance at school.
Could it happen here? The new Irish legislation covering school non-attendance, the Education (Welfare) Bill, just passed by the Oireachtas, does not contain a provision allowing the courts to make a parenting order. Instead it introduces, for the first time in Irish law, a provision for imprisoning parents who fail to send their children to school. Section 24.4 and 5 empowers the courts to impose up to a month in prison for the parent on a first conviction, and a further month in prison for each further day the child misses school. Under these provisions, a mother already convicted once, whose children subsequently missed 12 days from school, could face a maximum of a year in prison.
But there is no provision in the new legislation preventing the publication by the media of details that would identify the child, so no protection against sensationalist "guilty of being a bad mother" headlines.
Missed opportunities in a neo-Dickensian piece of legislation. - Yours, etc.,
Joseph McCarroll, PhD, School Attendance Officer, Willowfield Avenue, Goatstown, Dublin 14.