LABOUR IS TO table a bill to end single-sex schools in education within 15 years.

The party says the bill is needed amid “the wider discussion about gender equality” and argues it is already “de facto”  policy because the Department of Education has not sanctioned a new single-sex school since 1998. 

Research has shown that Ireland has one of the highest rates of single-sex education outside the Arab world, with 17% of our primary school children attending single-sex education and one-third of secondary schools being single-sex. 

Labour’s Aodhán Ó Ríordáin TD, who has previously written about this issue in The Journal, says now is the time for action to be taken. 

“Our proposal and our bill is that over 10 years every primary school should be co-educational and after 15 years that should happen at second-level,” he told Newstalk Breakfast. 

We appreciate the second level conversation is more complex, there are different dynamics at play there, but that’s what we’re trying to achieve. I think it will start the conversation rolling and the Department of Education has to be a persuader of school communities to amalgamate, or more simply to just accept both genders from a given September.

He adds arguments made that girls tend to better in single-sex schools “doesn’t stand up to modern analysis” and was “debunked” by the ESRI a number of years ago. 

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Ó Ríordáin, a former principal of an all-girls primary school, says that schools should be “reflective of winder society” and argues that “we don’t have single-sex creches, we don’t have single-sex universities”.

“I think if we’re trying to tackle some of the issues in our society that affect women quite profoundly, we are probably going to be more successful doing that in the multi gendered scenario,” he adds.  

The Dáil will also this week debate another education bill from Ó Riordáin which seeks to end remove a school’s right to reserve 25% of places for children and grandchildren of past pupils.