Dr. Michael Redmond:

With regard to the experiences which Senator Ruane described, I think I speak for everybody in this room when I say that there is no place for shaming of a child in any school, whether faith school or State school - no school. Schools are sites of love or they are nothing, pure and simple. The former Minister, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, is quite right when she describes the relationship with the school as a co-parenting relationship. I was principal for 15 years of two DEIS schools in Dublin, one in Finglas and one in Loughlinstown in Ballybrack. My experience, to relate to what the Chair said, is that the teachers, educators and parents in that school made intensive efforts to preserve the dignity of every single child and parent. We knew our families intimately. We went out to them. The home school community liaison project should be rolled out to every school in the country.

What the Chairman is pointing to relates directly to school culture, which is led by the school principal and the board of management. My experience of school leadership is that the principal is the most stressed person in the building. He or she is like someone at the neck of an hourglass and is carrying all of the responsibilities upwards from the board of management, to compliance with the Department of Education and Skills, to the local community. Below the principal is an entire school community and all the families who relate to that. We have a lone person at the neck of an hourglass who is meant to carry the entire cultural, financial, legal, employment and educational responsibility. That is an intolerable situation and we need additional deputy principals. There should be no such thing as a teaching principal in any school in the primary sector.

I can help a little with some of the issues members raised with regard to the publishing of accounts. In the post-primary sector, section 18 of the Education Act states that schools must publish, while not their full accounts, a précis of the accounts on the school website or share them with the parents' association. What is not required, though, is an account of how the voluntary contributions are spent. I note from the emerging discussions on the parent-school charter that that will be required and I have no doubt that schools would have no difficulty in sharing that information.

On anonymising parents' contributions, of course it is only the principal and maybe the school's financial person, generally the secretary, who will know who paid in. Parents are entitled to a receipt when they make a contribution and there has to be some acknowledgement of that. No teacher should know who paid what to whom under any circumstances, and that goes for school tours and some other situations where it can be held at a central leadership administration level in the school and no one needs to know who has paid what. Schools routinely buy uniforms for children. We buy books where no book rental scheme exists and we pay for school tours, all on a quiet, dignified, one-to-one basis. That has been happening for many years in schools of all traditions.

On the issue of books, the figures from the Department of Education and Skills told us in 2013 that it cost €234,000 in seed capital to set up a book rental scheme in a post-primary, non-DEIS school of 770 students. That is almost €250,000. The grant aid to that same school in any one year would be approximately €8,000. There is a huge deficit in seed capital. I did some research on this with our schools some years ago and asked them the impediments to setting up book rental schemes. Even though a majority of post-primary schools have them, some of the issues related to ebooks, in that they were moving to those. The VAT issue, which the Chair rightly pointed to, is a thorn in their side. There is the change in the curriculum, where, as the committee knows, the junior cycle has been reformed. The roll-out of new subjects prohibits schools from making investments in textbooks immediately. The lack of space in schools may seem like a small issue but, given the demographics in schools and the explosion in numbers, it is an issue. The bigger costs were the seed capital and staffing. One cannot rely and put more pressure on volunteer parents to run a book rental scheme which involves intensive amounts of administration.

We, therefore, make a plea to the committee to acknowledge in its report the real, grounded needs of schools in setting up and maintaining book rental schemes.

Finally, there have been two circulars in recent years instructing schools in the first instance to survey parents on their stance on school uniforms. By and large, schools have been doing this anyway, perhaps not in survey form, but certainly by consulting both parents' associations and student councils on school uniforms. Crests are a lightning rod for disaffection surrounding school uniforms. We have heard this from one speaker after another. Schools may be able to do more, but we should not be distracted from the fact that the systematic underfunding of our schools is the core problem. From relationship issues and the removal of any shaming that happens right through to unnecessary cresting and so on, there are issues that school management and its teachers can address, and we will promote this. A hundred circulars a year are sent to schools. Our schools must carry the policy change burden of 100 circulars a year. In this fraught landscape of policy overdrive, to be able to cope with all the spinning plates of running what is not only an educational organisation, but also a fiscal and a social one, the demands on school principals need to be taken into account as well.