Carol Nolan (Offaly, Independent)

I welcome the improvements the Minister of State has just listed, but in order to tackle the current bureaucratic nightmare, there are decisive solutions that could be taken. For example, there is a pilot of the small schools scheme. I completely welcome that. That is certainly one solution. If that were to be rolled out nationally where schools form clusters and support one another with admin, and if the threshold, which stipulates that the scheme is for schools of four teachers or fewer, were increased, I think it would capture and support more schools.

To give the Minister of State an idea of how bureaucratic this is becoming, since 2006 an average of 44 circulars have been issued to schools. That is a huge workload to land on any principal's desk, and that is just one layer of the workload that exists. As I said, we should look at the small schools scheme, roll it out nationally, extend it to more schools and support teachers. Teachers are managing a huge number of people. It is not just mainstream teachers, as I said; this has extended to SNAs and ancillary staff. We need to look at all that and tackle the bureaucratic nightmare quickly, efficiently and effectively before we have, unfortunately, more principals leaving their posts. It is time we put more solutions in place and allowed teachers do what they do best and what they signed up to do, which is to teach. That is what they are passionate about. I know this myself from being a former school principal. We had to do revenue returns and we had so much landing on the desk and, unfortunately, that situation has only got worse in recent years.

As I said, there are clusters of this pilot in Galway, Donegal and Mayo. I think its extension nationally would be one way of helping principals.

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