Parents have staged a protest outside an Educate Together school in Dublin calling for the board of management to resign over a row about Relationships and Sexuality Education being taught by Catholic organisation, Accord.

Accord is a marriage counselling organisation attached to the Bishops’ Conference. It teaches about contraception in a morally-neutral way and it counsels couples in same-sex marriages. It receives State funding.

The parents are from Castleknock Educate Together National School (CETNS). The protest was organised to coincide with an Accord information event for parents, which was cancelled yesterday, but the protest went ahead anyway. Educate Together schools are non-demoninational.

The organisation issued a statement saying “it is not appropriate for a religious-run organisation to deliver RSE in the context of an equality-based Educate Together school”. It added: “To this end, Educate Together will be writing to all schools under its patronage to ask them to ensure that relationships and sexuality education is delivered in a way that is consistent with its ethos and free from religious bias”.

Earlier this year, the CETNS parent teacher association said it could not see how an organisation “funded by the Catholic Church and with a clear religious ethos could ever have been deemed ‘fit for purpose’ to deliver the RSE programme in an Educate Together school”.

An email seeking support for the protest said: “This is about the parents of children making their voices heard within the school, and letting both the board and Educate Together know that secular instruction, in line with their stated ethos, is what we want for our children.”