Ms Moira Leydon:

When one has a whole-school approach to any phenomenon, whether it is to guidance which is a statutory function, or to health promotion, one needs teams, collaboration and integration. One needs someone to lead that team. One needs a person to say this is where our school is at in terms of health promotion and that we have five key areas to sustain, promote and get students engaged in. That does not happen unless one has a team. Leadership in this dimension is about having enough leadership positions in our schools where one can lead the programme.

Having adequate leadership leads to a sense of ownership. I coined the phrase earlier, “everybody's business, nobody's responsibility”. That is serious because if no one feels responsible, it does not happen. Leadership teams, however, are responsible and accountable.

The other area is benchmarking and the Acting Chairman was absolutely right to use those words. We have policy but we need to know what is happening. It might sound heretical for a teachers' union to say we possibly need another evaluation model. We do not have any evaluation model which looks at the way the health promoting school programme is implemented.We have many evaluations for subjects, programmes and a new model for child safeguarding. Given the Acting Chairman's statement about an epidemic and critical social challenges, do we now need to look at a framework for evaluating how schools are managing with the health promoting schools programme? It is important to add that that evaluation in schools is aimed at school improvement. It is not aimed at blaming them. That is how one benchmarks. For example, how is pastoral care done? Is there a canteen in the school? Many kids do not eat breakfast for social reasons. The chipper is a far nicer prospect than a mundane sandwich in a school canteen.

Leadership is about taking ownership. We need to know what is happening. Accordingly, we need to look at evaluation and good benchmarks. The Minister for Education and Skills has introduced an excellence fund in the Action Plan for Education, the purpose of which is getting activities going around key educational objectives. I suggest the committee look at that as a good way of piloting this.