Parents’ primary school selection: The Irish context

Parent ‘choice’, the recommendation of the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary  Sector Report (2012) as to how best to reshape the primary school system, via divestment, in  order to reflect Irish society’s increased diversity was sanctioned in 2012. The aim of divestment was to transfer the patronage of Catholic schools, the predominant form of  patronage in the primary school system to a patron of parents’ choice. Subsequent National  Parent Surveys (2012; 2013) in 43 areas identified 28 areas nationally with sufficient demand  for patronage change: the Educate Together (ET) patron was preferred in all but one area. To  date, only three existing schools have been divested. Catholic schools are opposing  divestment with claims that their parents are satisfied, while the Minister for Education in  2016 pointed to legal and social complexities since the foundation of the Irish State as reasons  for the almost negligible divestment. 

This study returns to three of the national survey sites to explore parents’ experiences of their  school selection. It draws on one-to-one interviews with 28 parents from contrasting rural and  city patronage school systems and inquires into how patronage and religion feature in their selection processes, employing the lens of Bourdieu’s interrelated concepts of habitus, capital  and field to analyse parents’ decision-making experiences in relation to their local contexts.  Moreover, it seeks to address the dearth of scholarship on parent choice in the Irish context by extending the work of international and national scholars on how class, ethnicity and  religion shape school ‘choice’ while also providing insights into contemporary debates around school patronage policy reform in Ireland.

The thesis further demonstrates that the primary patronage school system is the taken-for  granted structure within which all parents make their school selection. The patronage system  legitimises patrons and religion and in turn shapes the parents’ perceptions and strategies in  their school selection in different ways in rural and city settings. The parents in the rural sites  value community belonging, however, this is imbued with the family parish way of life which  holds historical, Catholic, national cultural contexts and classifications that constitute classed  and ethnic differentiations within and between schools. In contrast, the city location’s primary  school system, which is made up of different patron types, is characterised by competitive  access to sought-after, hierarchically positioned schools. The perceptions of the participating  parents in the study that the city’s school system’s competitive admission process necessitates social networking strategies were seen to be a function of admission criteria that legitimise  classed, ethnic and religious differences to maintain schools’ hierarchical position. While the  taken-for-granted primary school patronage system legitimises a diversity of patrons, the historical rule that gives parents the right for their children to opt-out of religious classes  reproduces the dominant Catholic culture within the system and local society. As such, the patronage school system offers parents the legitimacy through which they can segregate their  children’s schooling as this is locally dependent on the conferred social calls to order. The  contribution of this study consists in the insights gained about the operation of the patronage  school system by bringing to light the social and cultural dynamics within the processes by  which parents select primary schools in a number of rural and city contexts in Ireland.