Olwyn Enright (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)
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Question 12: To ask the Minister for Education and Science when she expects the first whole school evaluation reports will be made public; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [19863/06]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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As the Deputy will be aware, I believe that the publication of school inspection reports will go a significant way to addressing the real needs of parents, students, teachers and others for better information on schools. Inspectors' reports can identify when schools and teachers are working to optimum effect and where improvements are needed. The reports provide a fair analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of schools in a way that can provide a real indication of school quality.

When I decided that these reports would be published, I requested that the inspectorate of my Department conduct oral and written consultations with the education partners in relation to the publication process. Twenty-one organisations participated and the consultations were completed in January 2006. Written guidelines were subsequently produced on the publication of inspection reports. I laid the Education Act 1998 (Publication of Inspection Reports on Schools and Centres for Education) Regulations Act before the Houses of the Oireachtas on 31 January 2006.

As a result of these regulations, all reports arising from WSE inspections commenced on or after 6 February 2006 are subject to publication. Reports arising from inspections commenced prior to that date will not be published by the Department. The procedures provide that the school authorities have an opportunity to verify the facts in the report (period of 10 school days) and the school also has a right of response to the reports (a further 20 school days is allowed for this process). It is intended that both the inspection report and the school response (where this is provided by the school's board of management) will be published simultaneously.

A timeframe of 14 weeks (70 days excluding school holiday periods) is allowed from the time when the in-school activity is completed and the WSE report is placed on the Department's website. If a school appeals a report the process will take longer.

The first WSE reports are expected to be ready for publication before the end of June 2006. At present approximately 32 primary WSE reports and 6 post-primary WSE reports are with schools for either factual verification or school response. It is not possible to say precisely when these WSE reports will have completed all stages of the pre-publication process as this is the first time that schools are engaging in a written factual verification process and an optional school response process as part of the evaluation procedure. However, I anticipate that a significant proportion of the reports will be finalised for issue to schools and published on the Department's website before the end of June 2006.

As the timeframe for the publication of subject inspections is shorter than that for WSE it is expected that a number of subject inspections will be the first reports published and this should occur earlier in June.