Ms Joanne Irwin:

The TUI represents more than 16,000 practitioners, including teachers who work in the education and training boards and in community, comprehensive and voluntary secondary schools. The TUI is of the view that the two proposed pieces of legislation are contradictory and mutually exclusive. We contend that the Education (Amendment) Bill 2015 is mistaken, if well-intentioned, in approach, that the establishment of an ombudsman for education is unnecessary and would duplicate existing offices, and that any legislative change that may be required can be adequately accommodated in the proposed Education (Parent and Student Charter) Bill 2016, suitably revised.

The TUI supports the achievement in practice of the principle of appropriate involvement by students and parents in determining the culture and processes of a school. Our members - teachers, including principal teachers - have a professional commitment to the creation and maintenance of welcoming, inclusive and democratic school communities that are an integral and dynamic part of the social infrastructure of the broader communities they serve. In this context, making legislative provision for a charter is worthy of consideration. Such a charter, however, would have to reflect a balance of the rights and responsibilities of all parties. Moreover, a charter that imposed additional administrative and/or legalistic responsibilities on schools that lack the capacity to discharge them would be counterproductive. A number of our specific observations have their origins in this concern about unsustainable demands.

The TUI is at something of a disadvantage as the heads of the Education (Parent and Student Charter) Bill 2016, while proposing an expanded role for the Ombudsman for Children, do not provide the level of detail that would enable us to assess it definitively this stage. Schools are poorly resourced in the context of administrative and middle management structures. Boards of management rely on volunteers and there can be no realistic expectation that this will not continue to be the case. We would advise against additional legislative requirements that would increase the burden on boards.

We ask the committee to note that, under the current section 28 of the Education Act 1998, it is open to the Minister to prescribe procedures to allow grievances of “students, or their parents, relating to the students’ school” to be submitted and processed and to allow the “parent of a student or, in the case of a student who has reached the age of 18 years, the student, to appeal to the board against a decision of a teacher or other member of staff of a school”. The TUI has for several years urged successive Ministers for Education and Skills to prescribe procedures under this section of the Act, noting that procedures are available for him to prescribe. Were the Minister to confirm these procedures as the prescribed procedures under section 28, the sensible and logical aspiration of “determining appeals and resolving grievances in the school concerned” could be realised without imposing further bureaucratic demands on already overburdened schools. The TUI would again ask the Minister to engage the relevant parties, including representatives of parents and students, in discussions aimed at suitably adjusting the existing sectoral procedures and to approve the procedures that emerge from those discussions.

The Education (Parent and Student Charter) Bill seems to envisage each school developing its own procedures, following the guidelines that the Minister will issue in this regard. This would be enormously wasteful of very scarce resources. Some 4,000 separate attempts to reinvent the wheel in 4,000 schools are unnecessary and will lead to inconsistency, contradiction and unfairness. Litigation will almost certainly follow. Our message is simple: there is no need to reinvent the wheel. A further concern is that the general scheme seems strangely oblivious of the existence of robust processes to deal with complaints in regard to the conduct or competence of teachers. Those procedures have legislative underpinning under section 24 of the Education Act 1998 and Part 5 of the Teaching Council Act 2001.

It is imperative that any legislative change or initiative must not create further administrative workload, particularly for principal teachers. The effective functioning of schools as communities of learning is already being suffocated by burgeoning administrative demands. The proposed legislation has the potential to add new and unnecessary layers of complexity and to give rise to a more legalistic culture that will inevitably lead to increased cost for schools and the Exchequer.

A recurrent feature of legislation in the education sphere is the emergence of unintended consequences when it comes to implementation. Legislation that seeks equity is often frustrated in its implementation by rooted societal inequalities and by the exclusionary practices of some schools. Hence, schools that are selective regarding enrolment are least affected by equity-based legislation and those that are most inclusive are most affected. The greatest onus is placed on schools that are open, democratic, inclusive and most responsive to national policy. The TUI has a real concern that, once again, the greatest challenge will be faced by the schools that embrace the full, rich diversity in the student cohort and that they will have to face the challenge without the necessary resources. Furthermore, the introduction of a new and expanded governance requirement under the charter means that significant additional funding will be required to provide training to school staff and boards of management.

The proposed legislation seems, on the face of it, to propose a culture of culpability, predicated on the misconception that schools are responsible for all of society’s failings and that schools can somehow remediate family dysfunctionality where it occurs. This is unfair to schools that are struggling to manage after a decade of cutbacks which have left the system threadbare. There is a fine balance that must be struck between, on one hand, the appropriate remit of a school in terms of supporting and empowering an individual student or parent and, on the other, the overarching requirement that a school provide a safe environment for the greater student body. It is regrettable but undeniable, for example, that some schools have to manage and deal with unacceptable and occasionally violent behaviour. This must be taken into account in a charter, which must balance the rights of students and parents with concomitant responsibilities.

The proposed legislation also seems to assume that a large volume of complaints and grievances are not being adequately addressed at present. The TUI disputes this assumption. The Ombudsman for Children reports that there have been 4,000 complaints about schools to his office in the past 14 years. That constitutes fewer than 300 complaints per year in the context of 4,000 schools, serving 917,000 students, and, viewed objectively, constitutes a very low rate of complaint.

That is our initial opening statement. We will obviously have further views when we see the terms of the legislation.