It'll be with a huge sigh of relief that most mammies and daddies will send their darlings back to school after the summer holidays. Especially after the summer that never was, writes Ailish Connelly.
You do get the odd bod who wistfully stares into space and waxes lyrical about the great joy of having the kiddies under their feet all day, but I'll wager they are few and far between.
Most of us are delighted to get back to the routine, the daily schlep, the whoopla of the drop-off and pick-ups on mammy's free shuttle bus. (I know there are many dads who do the daily schlep, but to be fair, in my neck of the woods, it's mainly the mammies.)
We will be delighted, giddy even, because we know how bad it could be, if we hadn't managed to get our children into a school in the first place.
When you first enter the fray that is our education system, you have no idea of the minefield it actually is. You think, in your shining innocence, that it's a fairly straightforward process; you put little Connor/Katie's name down in your local school, a year or so before he/she is due to start and think no more about it. Some time in that year before little Connor/Katie sets foot in the school, the horror stories start to filter through into your previously worry-free consciousness.
How everywhere is booked up solid, how there's a waiting list, how limited places are, how every other school for miles around is in the same situation, how you may as well forget the whole kit and caboodle and get back into the bed and draw the duck-down duvet over your skull.
You contact the school and are told, there are no guarantees. So you start to jump through hoops and jig reels and do whatever is within your power to ensure that your child can get the education you had been led to believe was their right.
In our case, my husband was commandeered into the local school panto, reasoning that if he leapt around the stage for the school, for nothing, then our son would get into the school and forever end the gnawing concern in our heads.
He duly entered national school years ago and we are now in the throes of looking for a secondary school for him. And because I didn't have a clue that you had to have their name down in utero, and I'm not talking about exclusive, fee-paying schools here, a whole new set of problems loom. I can barely contain my excitement.
But such is the scenario that many parents are faced with every autumn that there is a constant, low-level anxiety about the whole education thing.
They don't find out until the very last minute, and sometimes not even then, that their child has no school place come September. It happened last year in Meath and Kildare.
The Department of Education claims that there are enough places for every child in the country. Try telling that to a befuddled parent who has queued overnight for the elusive spot. There may be room on the edge of the western seaboard but that's of little use if you live in Finglas. Or Lucan.
And if people have to move to the back end of Leinster to adequately house themselves, then surely the schools will have to be provided too. But that's a whole other argument.
Then, if the parents happen to dance all the reels and jigs correctly and scrape the child into a nearby-ish school, they discover there are 30 or more kids to a class. Well, yippee.
Your child can sit in a room full to bursting with other small people and a harassed teacher trying to teach the new curriculum to the best of her abilities, but if your kid isn't of genius or very clever standard, if English isn't his first language, if he has any tiny learning difficulty whatsoever then he may come away sorely disappointed. And perhaps unable to read.
Come September the Department of Education will start trotting out the well-worn line that the teacher/pupil ratio compares well with other EU countries at about 1 to 20. But that figure hides a different reality.
Teacher numbers include all the resource teachers, learning support teachers and non-teaching principals in a school, so the teacher-pupil ratio goes down.The numbers look good and Hanafin, when she gets back to her desk, can positively reaffirm to herself that things are moving in the right direction.
Educationalists, however, prefer to use class sizes and the average class size is in the mid-twenties. Unfortunately for Hanafin, the maternity hospitals don't release babies in even batches of 25 countrywide, so in many areas, especially in areas of rapid population growth, kids reach four years of age, it's time for school and there are generally more than 30 to a class.
In the school my kids attend most classes have more than 30 pupils. But if I were arguing with a department official about this I'd be told in no uncertain terms that the ratio was about one to 20. Talk about making the numbers fit. Then again, how dare I even question the numbers, sure aren't I one of the lucky ones? I have a place for my kids in a good school.
If I were the parent of a kid with special needs, I would be in the depths of despair. Because I would have no choice and probably nowhere to send them at all, period. And if I lived on a halting site the chances of my kids staying in full-time education till third level would be pretty low to non-existent. When the winds are blowing against you it's hard to succeed.
Yet there is this abiding notion that we have one of the best education systems in the world. Yes, for the many it is, for those who have the wherewithal, stamina and sheer bloodymindedness to pursue their rights vigorously. For those who fit the predictors of literacy and numeracy, ie third-level educated mother, small family, books in the home, yes, we have a great system.
But if I were a first-time parent of a four year old, or a stranger, new to our education system, with a perhaps less than fluent command of the English language, come September I may be baffled.
Next month, supposing my child has been accepted into a school at all, I'll get a list of fees (voluntary), books (expensive), uniforms (expensive) and after-school activities (again expensive). And I'll wonder.
And after her first year in junior infants in a class of twenty-something, she will find herself in a class of thirty-something. I'll wonder some more. I'll wonder why everyone rattles on about this excellent, accessible, free education system. And I'll surely wonder why we don't tackle our newly-elected representatives on this issue.