Enrolment Schemes - Secretary's Guidelines for Integrated Schools
Guidelines issued by the Secretary for Education to assist integrated schools when developing enrolment schemes and to advise these schools on good practices which will enable them to manage their enrolment schemes in line with the requirements of the legislation.
Fair and Transparent
One of the purposes of the legislation is to ensure that the selection of applicants for enrolment is carried out in a fair and transparent manner. The Ministry believes that to be fair and transparent, the selection criteria must be:
- written down;
- freely available;
- unambiguous
- consistently applied.
This means that parents should be in no doubt about the basis on which enrolment places will be offered. The board's selection criteria will need to be much more specific than a simple general statement like "Offer of enrolment places will be made at the discretion of the principal".
The first requirement for selection must be the ability to show that a student qualifies for enrolment in terms of the school's special character, as specified in the school's integration agreement and referred to in Section 29(1) of the Private Schools Conditional Integration Act 1975.
The Ministry will then expect to see priority being given in accordance with some geographical or other similarly specific criteria. (See next section.) Beyond this the board may wish to develop other priority categories, each with its own criteria attached. A possible organisational format is given in the pro forma enrolment scheme which is attached as Appendix 1.