School patronage in Ireland is creating segregation, a school principal has charged, despite evidence to the contrary.

As four non-denominational Educate Together schools in Dublin launched a common enrolment system, Colette Kavanagh, a principal of one of the schools told The Irish Times newspaper that due to the current patronage system, new schools were becoming the schools of ‘newcomer’ families.

“We don’t want to say we have segregated schools, but we have,” Kavanagh insisted.

However, her assertion contradicts a Department of Education audit of primary schools in 2008 which found that Catholic schools have higher than average levels of inclusion when measured, among other things, by social class and ethnicity.

An ESRI report called ‘School Sector Variation among Primary Schools in Ireland‘, commissioned by Educate Together, found that while Educate Together schools have the highest percentage of non-nationals, “where Catholic schools have migrant pupils among the student body, the spread of nationalities is wider compared to the other two types of primary school.”

Referencing the Dublin catchment areas of Lucan, Swords, Balbriggan as well as Galway, Kavanagh said in areas where schools were oversubscribed, new schools might have a student body comprising 85% of newcomer children – those of non-Irish families, of returning Irish families and of Irish families moving from one area to another. Kavanagh added that in addition to the patronage system, the issues of a first-come-first-served policy and unregulated parental choice were also factors in creating a system of segregation which the Department of Education was failing to tackle.

On the issue of patronage, Kavanagh charged the Department: “They didn’t tackle it…There is no patronage system in other countries…there is a national school system.”

In fact, in other countries such as Britain and the Netherlands, publicly-funded Church-run schools are commonplace.