Schools around the country are taking action to highlight accommodation concerns in the run up to the General Election.

Students from Stepaside Secondary School in Dublin will down pens and leave their classrooms tomorrow to march with parents, teachers, and local politicians to highlight concerns over delays in building a new school.

They will march through a housing estate and along a short stretch of the Ballyogan Road to a nearby site, earmarked for a new school building that will, it is hoped, become the school's permanent home.

The march is taking place to highlight concerns at delays in the provision of the new school building, as the project seems to have stalled.

"If it’s not built by September 2021", said Deputy Principal Colin Doyle, "we’re in trouble".

He added: "We will have to massively curtail our intake, and that would be a disaster for parents locally."

In Stepaside’s four years in existence it has moved home no fewer than three times. It began life in prefabs in the car park of a local rugby club.

Now it is camped out in spare rooms in a local primary school. There were more prefabs in between, and there will be more prefabs next year when students move again to more temporary accommodation which will, they hope, be on that permanent site.

Stepaside Secondary School is not the only school that will be protesting over the coming days.

In another suburb on the other side of Dublin city, primary school children from Pelletstown Educate Together will march with their parents and teachers, to highlight a similar situation next Monday.

Pelletstown too is just four years old too, and it too has already had three temporary homes - including a basement in a local community centre, and its current home, a former show apartment in a local housing estate.

"We feel like we are constantly being let down", said Principal Caitríona Ní Cheallaigh.

"We've no faith, we’ve no trust now in anything that we are told by the Department [of Education]."

A demographic boom means that the Pelletstown and Stepaside schools not the only ones in difficulty.

Numbers attending primary school have grown by more than 25% over the past two decades.

Enrolment has stabilised this year at primary level but the pressure is now coming to bear at post primary.

And there is a huge backlog of schools waiting for new buildings.

There are 380 schools listed on the Department of Education’s Major Projects building list.

There are almost 800 more schools listed in a second category - for schools requiring additional accommodation.

This list includes schools that require significantly more space - eight additional classrooms in some instances. More than 100 of the schools on this list need additional accommodation for children with autism.

These are all projects where the Department of Education fully agrees that the additional accommodation or school building is required.

While many of these schools are new ones, in new suburbs where young families have settled, other schools have been waiting for new buildings for 20 years or more.

Crana College in Buncrana, Co Donegal, was built to accommodate 300 students, but now it is home to 556.

The school expects to grow by around 60 additional pupils every year for at least the next three - all to cater for local demographic growth.

The school said the overcrowding is felt most on the corridors and in recreational and eating areas.

It said students are forced to eat their lunches while sitting on the floor, and it does not have enough toilets.

The school was the first on the Inishowen peninsula to build a special classroom for children with autism.

Its concern includes frustration at not being able to make provision for more children with special educational needs.

Crana College is on the march this week too.

"On Thursday all of our students and all our staff will walk down Main St Buncrana", said principal Kevin Cooley.

"Our students deserve what everyone else has, and we want to highlight to our politicians that we have been waiting for a new school since 1998".

The Department of Education says more than €1.2 billion has been spent on school buildings since 2018 and a further €620m is allocated for this year. It says 139 projects costing between one and 20 million each were being worked on over the past two years, as well as more than 400 smaller projects. All this to cater for 40,000 students.

The Department estimates that this year will see around 60 large scale school building projects beginning construction, to deliver more than 30,000 school places.

But what schools like Stepaside ETSS, Pelletstown, and Crana College want to know is; will their projects be among that 60?

The Department cites a wrangle over planning in Stepaside. It says "once planning permission has been secured" this project will progress. It says construction is planned for Pelletstown starting in late 2020 or the first half of 2021. Its update on Crana College is the briefest; "The Department is continuing engagement with landowners in the area to secure a site", it states.

One parent in Co Wicklow contacted RTÉ to highlight the situation in her local secondary school. In the email she writes that the school has this week turned her son and other local children away because it does not have enough space.

"It has been known for years that an extra class would be coming from the primary school this year and the department have dragged their heels on the planned extension", she writes.

Keen like many others to highlight the issue, she adds: "with it being election time...we might be able to help our kids".