Mr. Páiric Clerkin:

I thank the Cathaoirleach. IPPN is the professional body for the leaders of Irish primary schools, and provides a variety of supports and services to almost 6,500 principals and deputy principals. As a body supporting principals in their professional and personal development, IPPN has an obligation to highlight the increasing challenges faced by those principals who teach full time in addition to their leadership role, commonly referred to as teaching principals. More than half of primary school principals teach full time in addition to their school leadership role, as close to 2,000 schools in the State have fewer than 177 pupils. Today I will set out these challenges and recommendations, with particular reference to the impact of work overload on the ability of teaching principals to effectively lead and manage the teaching and learning in their schools, and also the impact this has on their personal health, well-being and personal life.

We believe that two key things need to be prioritised to support teaching principals. The first is adequate time to carry out leadership and management responsibilities, that is, a minimum of one day per week, which has been IPPN's number one priority for several years. Within that, a re-categorisation of schools is needed to take into account the reality of the actual size of the school. For this to work, a national panel of qualified substitute teachers needs to be set up and allocated to clusters of schools to ensure adequate and consistent cover for teaching principals’ leadership and management days. Second, all schools need to have access to full-time skilled administrative support to ensure all the administration is carried out efficiently and to facilitate communication with parents and others to free up the principal from such work in order that they can focus on teaching, learning, leadership and management. There are a number of ways to achieve this, which we will be happy to discuss.

Importantly, 18 of the 137 special schools are led by teaching principals. Due to the complexities of the role of principal of a special school, the large numbers of non-teaching staff and many special schools catering for both primary and post-primary pupils, IPPN recommends that principals of all special schools be automatically designated as administrative principals.

The number of release days a teaching principal has depends on the number of classroom teachers in the school, and there are between 17 and 29 days per school year available for this purpose. This is inadequate. Everyone can appreciate the importance of devoting all one's time and energy as a teacher to the pupils and their learning. That is no more than all our pupils deserve, and it is also the understandable expectation of every parent in the country. The role of principal is also critical to the school’s success, and to the culture, the environment, the quality of relationships across the school community and the quality of teaching and learning.

Principals need adequate time to lead teaching and learning, manage all aspects of the school’s work, and support the board of management in governing the work of the school. The 2,000 teaching principals in this country, however, are expected to do both roles at the same time. It is simply unsustainable with the current resources available to them.

They are continually being called away from teaching to deal with other important tasks. It is a significant concern that children in the teaching principal’s class often pay the price for these interruptions. The principal also pays the price in stress levels, guilt, work overload and so on. Teaching principals are the school leaders with the least support, as secretarial-administrative, caretaking and cleaning, middle leadership posts, financial and other resources are all based on the size of the school. It also has to be clarified that the way schools are categorised is fundamentally flawed because the complexity of teaching and learning is not taken into consideration. The number of teachers counted for the calculation of leadership and management days refers to mainstream class teachers only. It does not take into account additional support and ancillary staff such as learning support teachers, resource teachers, special class teachers, special needs assistants, ancillary staff or bus escorts, in addition to other staff such as nurses and occupational therapists who are often allocated to special schools. These additional staff members report on a daily basis to the principal. Some schools have three teachers, including the principal, and a part-time secretary. They are considered to be three-teacher schools. Another school may have three mainstream class teachers, a resource teacher, a learning support teacher, four SNAs, as well as ancillary staff. They are also considered a three-teacher school, even though there are more than nine staff in the school. They are not equal, but they get the same resources. It is fundamentally unfair.

I would be delighted to elaborate on any of the above points. Of course, the Irish Primary Principals Network, IPPN, has plenty of other suggestions that we do not have time to go into today but it will provide additional information to the committee for further consideration.

In surveying our members in 2015 regarding our priorities nationally, number one on the list for all principals, whether administrative principals or teaching principals, was that all teaching principals would be allocated one day a week to focus on leadership and management. I acknowledge that there have been some incremental increases in 2015 and last year but we now need a clear outline of how and when we will reach the required one day per week and how we will ensure consistency for the children in those classes in terms of substitute cover. I hope the committee has a copy of the staff photograph that I submitted of Scoil Chonaill in Donegal. I think the committee will agree that the present staffing structure, when it was set up, certainly was not set up for that type of scenario. Go raibh míle maith agaibh.