Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

As the Minister notes, a great deal of work has been done by principals, deputy principals and boards of management. Looking at any school with 200 or 300 pupils, one can see the additional workload around procurement for Covid. I also wish to highlight the problem of recruiting people from assistant principal to take on the principals' workloads. Many assistant principals regard it as an onerous task. The administration of the role and how it is done needs to be examined.

I suggest the Department considers ongoing training, say in procurement or business consulting, for principals. It is very unfair that people can be elevated into a position that they might not have wanted to take but they felt responsible and now they find themselves in the middle of all these other governance issues which they have probably not been exposed to before.

See this speech in context