Dr. P?draig MacNeela:

On inspectors and the inspectorate and how that might work, the last thing one wants is schools dreading a visit or to be monitored. The way we have seen this work in higher education is for the HEA to take the lead in establishing the standards. Both Professor Crowley and I worked on the consent framework in 2019. That led to the implementation programming that the HEA centre leads. Now each university each year has to report back on a set of key indicators, but they are large institutions. I am talking about something that would be doable by schools. I think there are comparisons. For example, in each of the higher education institutions we have cross-disciplinary cross-faculty committee so everyone can work together on agreed goals. Sometimes there are benefits to that - there are lots of experts etc. - and sometimes there are disadvantages, for instance, where people are coming from completely different areas and you might never see each other except at that meeting. A school is a community. We need to look at the ways that schools can regulate themselves and have self-evaluation processes whereby senior management are represented. Teachers with a special interest in SPHE, student representation and parental representation can combine to agree and identify what they want the school to look like in terms of the programming, not only in the classrooms but also the posters, the information, the procedures and information sharing that is taking place.