Teaching Matters: Good morning Minister. Among all the reading your new officials will have pushed at you over the past week, they will not have included the advice you really need: how to avoid making the mistakes of your predecessor.

I have eight suggestions:

1. Get your priorities right

How you pick your priorities has a determining influence on how effective you are. Strictly speaking, you should have one priority alone - the education system as a whole. Your first and most important job is to sell education as a national priority to your colleagues around the Cabinet table.

Do not make the mistake your predecessor did of looking for your priorities within the system itself. The important thing is the system as a whole: it must all work if any of it is to work. Robbing Peter to pay Paul among your internal Departmental commitments is a recipe that sells the system short - and more importantly, in the longer term it sells the country short.

2. Don't play favourites among the sector

The significant cuts in the current budgets of the universities convinced the universities that whatever priority the previous Minister had, it was not higher education. The university community was left with the clear impression that Noel Dempsey did not truly value it, or see it as a building block for national development.

The point here is not that the primary (or secondary) education is important, or needs more investment. The reality is that all parts of the system need massive support, and they need it together. Favouring one over the other pits the educationalists in the different camps against each other in the fight for resources. Knocking one another's needs helps neither, but only adds fuel to the arguments of those people who do not wish to spend more on education. This takes their (and the Minister's) eye off the real ball, in the real game.

3. Don't send conflicting signals

On your predecessor's watch, he presided over the "pause" in funding for the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions. This was eventually reversed after howls of protest, but not before many questions were asked, in Ireland and abroad, about the continuing commitment of Government to R&D support and to creating a knowledge-based economy. With research we lay the foundations for long-term development.

4. Pick the right fights at the right time

As Minister, you need to choose your battlegrounds carefully, and to get your timing right. Your predecessor did neither with his ill-fated attempt to re-introduce university fees. He launched what was indeed a necessary debate without waiting for the predictable support that would come from the OECD review group, thereby strengthening his arm. He then had to concede a battle lost even before the OECD reported, and created a major ongoing funding problem for third-level that has now been left in your hands, Minister.

5. Make peace with the teachers

For ages now, industrial relations in education have been abysmal. Forget who started it, and who's behaving badly now - who is going to end it? It could be you! Certainly, anyone taking a long look at the future of Irish education would be foolish to believe that very much progress towards change can be achieved without getting the teachers at all levels on your side and rooting for you.

6. Re-orient the education system to science

Here, in this critical area, your predecessor ignored the ready-made recipe that was set out for him. He neglected to implement the recommendations of the report of the Task Force on Physical Sciences. Apart from the Forfás success in amalgamating all promotional efforts for S&T as a career, and putting in place by your Department already planned curricular initiatives, all the major recommendations were left largely unimplemented, notwithstanding the downside for the future Irish economy. This is a dropped ball that you can pick up right away, Minister. (Full disclosure: I chaired that Task Force.)

7. Restructure higher education

Your predecessor made little progress in bringing the Institutes of Technology under the HEA and in giving them the same managerial freedoms - and therefore parity of esteem - as the universities. You can rectify this by acting on the OECD recommendation for a new Tertiary Education Authority to replace the HEA.

Another issue your predecessor did not advance, and which is referred to with emphasis in the OECD report, is the taking of a strategic overview of the total higher-education provision. This is an important matter which must be handled with urgency and great delicacy, so as to respect institutional autonomy.

8. Be ambitious, be bold!

As a Minister, you owe it to your Government to bring important developmental issues to Cabinet - even if they will require considerable funding.

Worthy examples were Micheál Martin's championing of the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions; a more timid Minister would have been overawed at the prospect of seeking such huge funding.

The future of Irish education, and the future of the Irish economy, will depend on our seeing that same boldness from you. Good luck!

• Danny O'Hare is a former president of Dublin City University