Dr. Harold Hislop:

One of the interesting things from the pupil questionnaires and student questionnaires is the extent to which Irish students feel safe in schools. There are very high percentages there – often over 90%. What is really interesting is when the questionnaire data comes in for an individual school, if that is significantly lower than we would expect normally, we would immediately say to the school that it might think it is dealing well with bullying but there is clear evidence that it needs to go back and go through its anti-bullying lessons and make sure that children know who to talk to and who to report bullying to. It can be quite a shock sometimes for a school because when we interview those involved they say the school has an excellent anti-bullying policy and it is doing an excellent job on that but when we get the data they throw up a completely different set of questions.

The issue of school self-evaluation was raised by Senator Moran. I will ask Mr. Ó Donnchadha to talk about it in a bit more detail. Self-evaluation is very much a process that is owned by the school itself. It is a whole attitude of asking questions about how one is doing one’s own work internally as a group of teachers, a principal and a board, and if they are doing the job they should be doing and getting the best results for the children. Very often, what we see is that schools traditionally have not been asking those hard questions of themselves. We can come and ask the hard questions as an external set of eyes, and it is really important that we do that, but the change will happen if schools own the change and want to make the change. If they can identify areas in which they are strong or weak and they tackle the weaknesses then one has an organisation that is on the move. That is what self-evaluation is about.

Senator Moran made a very good point about the public nature of that and the competition that schools face. The published report, or the report that is public, is not the most important part; it is the honest questions that the schools ask internally and the data they look at. Mr. Ó Donnchadha can talk about the data in more detail.