Mr. Seán Cottrell:

I thank the Chairman for the invitation to this committee meeting on the issue of leadership in schools. The preparation of our submission has been informed by international research, consultations with principals' associations around the world and feedback from the 3,500 principals of primary schools who have approximately 500,000 children in their care every day.

We face a major challenge because we are failing to harness the power of leadership in schools.

I want for a moment to plant the thought among the members that the effect of a principal in a school is similar to the effect in yeast in dough. Our education system may not be the best in the world but it is not far off that when we peel back some of the layers, and that gap can be bridged if our school principals are empowered to be leaders of learning, a theme to which I will return. By empowering principals to be true leaders of learning in schools, we can significantly improve the educational outcomes for children and prepare them for the world of tomorrow, which is a very different world.

It is unrealistic and unsustainable to entangle principals with the myriad of tasks that have nothing to do with their role. Imagine the reaction of an airline company if it found that its CEO was doing work such as cleaning the airplanes between journeys? We do not have a focus in this country yet about the idea of the principal being the leader of learning as opposed to the leader of other work in a school. There are many challenges but the committee will be glad to know that we have solutions to these challenges.

There are eight themes in our submission but I will address only two because there is not the time to address them all. I will deal first with the early stages of a principal's career, namely, the recruitment and appointment phase. We must attract the best teachers into leadership roles in our schools. There is a saying among principals that good teachers do not always make good principals but poor teachers never make good principals. A principal teacher, first and foremost, must be a good teacher because to refer to it as Gaeilge, it is príomh oide - the main teacher, but that is something that we not value enough.

Many people think that teachers apply for principalship as a promotion but in reality the research shows that the main motivation people have to become a principal is largely that they have a belief that they are a good teacher and they want their philosophy and methodology of teaching to be over a full school, and not only their classroom, through the influence that they can have on teachers. Getting the right teacher for a school is critical. If that is not done, the implications are profound, particularly for the children.

We would recommend that, first, there needs to be a clearly defined job description for principals because currently the job description for principals is based on a 1973 circular, which is a long time ago. There has been much research done on the role of principals by many different groups, including ourselves, but there needs to be a system-wide definition for principals based on what best practice suggests.

The people who select principals have an onerous task and the people who select the selectors have an even more responsible task but often these people have no training in any form of recruitment, education or school leadership. There are horror stories about how some appointments are made. Appropriate training must be made available for people in selecting principals of schools.

There is a need for a flexible career structure-----