The harsh reality televised on Netflix’s Awake, where contestants endure sleeplessness and mind-numbing pursuits such as counting coins to emerge victorious, parallels the harsh, real-life struggle in many parts of the UK for families vying for a secondary school spot. Similarly, Just like the American game show Touch the Truck, which involves participants hanging onto a truck in a shopping centre until exhaustion for the chance to own it, and where participants often lose grip due to exhaustion or hallucinations.
In cities like Dublin, Cork, Galway, and extensive commuter towns, the competition for secondary school placements is akin to a game show that torments participants. The stress and anxiety lasts for months and results in countless sleepless nights, as parents fight for their children’s places for the upcoming academic year in September. It’s akin to a cruel waiting game where hopeful families are holding out for a call or a letter bearing the news on their school application. The sheer scale of the issue is evident, with waiting lists for many schools reaching the hundreds and only one in five applications being successful in the heavily oversubscribed institutions.
Adding to the chaos, when parents discover no local schools can take more pupils, they are forced into a frantic last-minute application spree for institutes based much further away. Children too, are heavily impacted in the process, witnessing their peers excitedly prepare for school, talking about uniforms and open house events while they’re faced with potentially leaving their local communities for an education.
The heart of the matter lies in flawed planning strategies. The fact that the planning process is led by housing development often means a lack of consideration for the education needs of the future residents until it’s too late. Therefore, delays in creating adequate school infrastructures are inevitable, usually stretching up to a decade. Resultantly, many new schools start operating in makeshift, precarious settings languishing in prefab or modular accommodations for years, unable to offer comprehensive curriculums that accommodate science laboratories or other essential facilities.
A significant part of the problem is also the competition amongst schools during offer admissions. Schools, in most instances, are reluctant to cooperate and prefer to compete, leading to a confusing overlap of applications and casting doubts on the authenticity of waiting list positions.
The school admission system, particularly in high-income areas like southern Dublin, is plagued by dysfunction. Despite certain regulations against prejudice, schools have largely retained independence and autonomy. They have the power to create admission regulations that favour offspring and even descendants of former students, compromising up to a quarter of total school seat availability. Schools have the liberty to determine the extent of their catchment areas and select a number of feeder elementary schools as they consider suitable.
The situation is further aggravated by a bulging demographic of secondary-level students. A crisis that has grown gradually over a decade, the warning signs were hardly hidden. Quite noticeable is the fact that most schools engage in competition, rather than cooperation when concerning admissions. Inevitably, it leads to overlapping applications for post-secondary institutions, leaving many in uncertainty about their actual position in the wait list. Reality only becomes apparent once duplicate school offers and waiting lists are sorted out, revealing whether a place is available for a pupil or not. Such clarity sometimes emerges only by the start of a new academic year. In bleak cases where a school place isn’t available, a child is entitled to nine hours of home tuition, assuming a family can even secure a teacher.
No matter how ironic it might be, blame is often placed on the shoulders of parents by educational authorities for multiple school applications, conveniently ignoring the chaos of the very admission system itself.
Alarming inadequacies in planning are typically glossed over with temporary fixes. I have personally experienced the escalating pressure, with my eldest son currently attending primary school’s fourth grade. In our town of Greystones, Co Wicklow, scarcity of seats is a harsh reality in all three secondary schools. Recently, approximately 70-80 children from localities within the catchment area failed to secure any school place. This was hardly unexpected. In fact, a heads up was provided last October by the trio of secondary school heads with a collective press release, highlighting the shortages due to postponements in much-anticipated school construction projects, which have unfortunately failed to keep step with the swelling population.
The Constitution intriguingly shields the idea of autonomy in parental decisions regarding education, yet in actuality it’s often seen that parents face daunting limitations and are left with no real choices; they are forced to accept whatever is available.
There was a recent incident when, at the eleventh hour, a local secondary school was convinced by the Department of Education to admit two extra classes with a total of 48 pupils. It appears they are counting on the remaining parents being desperate enough to make do with whatever they can get, whether that implies battling heavy traffic to get into Dublin or paying exorbitantly for private education.
The issue has been merely pushed aside for now, with the expectation that the problem will exacerbate by the upcoming year. The school that accepted additional students, alarmingly, lacks any extra classroom facilities. This means they will need to greatly decrease their intake of first-year students in 2025 in order to accommodate everyone, unless more temporary classrooms can be procured. Work hasn’t even started on a permanent school building that has been discussed for years past.
The struggle parents face to get their child into mainstream schools pales in comparison to the effort required for special needs education. Families with children who have additional needs are painfully familiar with the strain of attempting to apply to numerous schools or having their children transported far from their local communities and separating them from their friends.
The solution to alleviating parental stress doesn’t require revolutionary innovation. An effective planning system, parallel delivery of basic amenities including schools and health clinics with housing; admission policies in schools that focus on local children; and a unified school admission system to clearly indicate actual applicant volume could contribute to mitigating prolonged suffering.
Popular reality television routinely recycles clichés and tropes. The “fleeting demographic rule” is one, suggesting that as target audiences change due to ageing or waning interest, content can be reused. This might possibly be an explanation for the persistent neglect these problems have encountered.
If there existed the political determination, adequate planning, and straightforward policy changes, it might just be possible for parents to be spared from the agonizing insecurity of premature exclusion from the school admissions procedure.