Planned roles will help principals ‘lighten their workloads’

Extra middle-management posts being created from next autumn should allow school leaders give more time to improving education and other work, Education Minister Richard Bruton has told primary school principals.

He was responding to criticisms that more time is needed outside the classroom for 60% of the country’s 3,300 primary school principals who spend most of their week teaching pupils.

Mr Bruton told more than 1,100 primary principals and deputy principals that extra posts being created from September will help lighten the workload by allowing duties to be distributed across schools.

A ban on filling of vacant posts of responsibility, under which teachers took on additional responsibilities for extra pay, has seen many of the roles fall to principals or to be neglected.

Mr Bruton told the Irish Primary Principals Network (IPPN) annual conference that new structures will be different from the pre-recessionary situation when around half of all teachers had such posts of responsibility. Instead, he said, teachers could be appointed to such roles in response to the different and changing needs of each school.

Seán Cottrell CEO of the IPPN at the IPPN Conference.

But 1,000 extra posts of responsibility across primary and second-level schools are being sanctioned for the coming school year, subject to a new system of distributed leadership to be agreed with unions and school management bodies.

Mr Bruton agreed with IPPN chief executive Sean Cottrell that increased time and space for principals to deliver change are more important than priorities like reducing class sizes or reversing cuts to day-to-day funding for schools.

Mr Cottrell, who retires this year, said these issues were identified as IPPN’s priorities in a recent strategic plan, but are the same as he has been presenting to nine education ministers in his 17 years leading IPPN.

The first priority is to give teaching principals one day a week for administrative duties which would require funding for replacement or substitute teachers. Mr Bruton said he could not guarantee the necessary resources for this measure as he does not know what funding will be available to him for 2018.

Among many tributes paid to Mr Cottrell, a former principal of Glounthaune NS in Cork, was the awarding of an international prize. Fiona Forbes, president of the International Confederation of Principals, presented him with its inaugural award for professional contribution to global education for his many years of promoting school leadership.