Mr. Seán Cottrell:

The current process of allowing a principal to step down from the role is flawed. Despite it being in the best interest of the pupils, the staff and the principal when a principal wishes to step down, first, there must be a vacancy in the school and, second, he or she is put down as the most junior member of staff in the ranking of seniority. It means that a person who may have served in a school for several years quite successfully and had the courage to know that it was no longer the best place for them and decided to step aside will get punished. It is a very undignified way to wind up one's career as a teacher in that the person will be first to go on the panel and be redistributed if the numbers in the school fall.

The second theme I would like to address is continuous professional development, CPD. It is part of the course in virtually every other profession and it is obligatory in many cases but we do not have any such obligation. There is no requirement for an aspiring principal to have undertaken any course in education management or leadership. It is not necessary. Even after appointment, there is still no requirement to undertake CPD because there is an assumption that if one was a good teacher and has been appointed principal that one is fine. However, the reality, is that teaching in a classroom and leading a school are two totally different jobs.

Professor Michael Fullan from Toronto, who is a world recognised expert on leadership in schools and such matters, says that if the goal is to improve student learning, investing in school leadership offers the best value for money compared with other forms of intervention. He said that it was the influencing effect of the principal teacher that brought that value.

We recommend that CPD become compulsory but it should not be necessarily compulsory for a person who applies for the role of a principal currently because there is not enough provision for such services. Rather than make it compulsory, there should be an extra weighting for points in a marking scheme for the appointment of a principal position, a person who has completed a relevant course should be awarded extra points for it. In other words, it should be highly incentivised rather than made compulsory. We are considering this proactively. Given the need to do something around CPD, we are establishing a national centre for leadership and innovation, which will be a virtual centre initially. We are excited about it because we have got a tremendous reaction from the different stakeholders to the establishment of the centre, including some international interest in it. It will offer programmes and leadership not only for principal teachers and teachers but for parents, children, boards of management and other interested groups. It is part of our five-year strategy. We hope to be a contributor to this rather than simply a commentator.

The committee has had our formal submission and hopefully the members have had a chance to read it. I decided not to repeat what is in it but to comment on a few topics covered in it. We have examined the issues of recruitment and CPD but I stress that the six other topics covered in the submission are equally important. We can no longer stand by and do nothing. If in ten years time we were to appear before a similar committee, there would be no excuse. We cannot say that we did not know about the leadership issue. I had the opportunity to visit a school in New Zealand many years ago. When we went to the school we could not find the principal. We found there was secretary, a receptionist and an administrator and we found the principal in a classroom. The principals there spend most of their time in the classrooms coaching new teachers, helping teachers with different challenges, dealing with children with special needs, children who are disadvantaged or whatever the issue may be. They consider that to be normal but we were surprised at the idea that the principal would be in the classroom. That principal did not know about the school electricity bill, plans or the types of responsibilities principals in Ireland have, which is a reflection on our governance structure. It is because we have ineffective and non-complete functionality from our boards of management that principals end up having to take up that parental slack.

To compare the effect of a principal in a school with the yeast in dough, without the best yeast we will not get great bread but with wonderful yeast we can make wonderful bread.