Mr. John Boyle:

The Department introduced a new initiative a number of years ago. It has had some amount of them over the past number of years but one initiative that proved challenging for schools intended to move from an evaluation model whereby an external evaluator, school inspector or team thereof came into a school to a situation where the schools themselves were forced to do a lot more self-evaluation so that when the inspectors arrived, much of the homework had been done for them. In a submission to the Department in early May, we had a number of key requests. The focus must be on the well-being of staff, students and parents in this time of the pandemic. We felt that this was a time to lay those initiatives aside for one year and were delighted when the Department agreed that there would be no further school self-evaluation. A school may, of course, evaluate how it is responding to the pandemic. I hope schools do that and let us know quickly if they need further resources so that we can negotiate with the Department.

New initiatives, unnecessary paperwork and inspections put undue pressure on everybody in the community. That cannot happen at this time.

The whole focus here is to get people back safely and to get them back into the groove of teaching and learning, as it were. That cannot happen under the pressure of inspections or school self-evaluation.