High Court refuses school enrolment challenge over parish boundary

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

The High Court has refused a parent’s challenge arising from the rejection of her child’s application for a national school place for the 2022–23 school year. Ms. Justice Bolger heard the application on 26 July 2022 and delivered judgment on 29 July.

The school was oversubscribed. Its policy gave priority first to siblings of pupils who had attended the previous school year and then to applicants living within the town’s Roman Catholic parish boundary. In February 2022, the parent was told her child had not been offered a place and was third on the waiting list.

The board of management upheld its decision on review. A committee considering an appeal under section 29 of the Education Act 1998 refused the appeal in a written decision dated 10 May 2022. The parent then sought to have that decision quashed and the matter reconsidered.

The parent argued that, without a map showing the parish boundary, the committee could not establish whether the admissions policy had been correctly applied. She also argued that she had been denied fair procedures because a breakdown of places allocated under the sibling and parish criteria, supplied by the board to the committee, had not been shared with her.

The respondents argued that the committee’s task was to establish whether the published policy had been correctly applied, rather than to assess the policy itself. They also argued that sending the appeal to a new committee would be futile. The supplied extract records that Justice Bolger refused the application, but does not include her detailed reasons.