It been a long road for the National Parents Council (Primary) since its early years when meetings were held at kitchen tables in members' homes. Exciting is how national co-ordinator Fionnuala Kilfeather describes her time as NPCP chairperson back in the Eighties. This period of drastic cutbacks in education when Mary O'Rourke was Minister for Education was something of a baptism of fire for NPC members.

"We found ourselves speaking in public for the first time and marching along with teachers to protest against the cuts," she recalls. It was only when her daughters attended national school in Booterstown, Co Dublin, that Kilfeather first became involved in a parents' organisation. At that time there was no parents association in the school and the NPC had yet to be established.

Kilfeather, a graduate of UCD and an architect by profession, was elected as a parent representative to the school's board of management. When the then Minister for Education, Gemma Hussey, set up the NPC in 1985 she quickly involved herself in the setting up of a parents' council in her children's school.

When the NPCP acquired funding to employ a national co-ordinator, Kilfeather decided to abandon architecture and apply for the job. "I had become more and more interested in education, in the social change that was taking place and in the development of a civil society," she explains. The council had a huge role to play.

The NPCP's national co-ordinator started in February 1992 in one room with a part-time assistant, Carmel Graham. Today the organisation boasts six full-time staff, but Kilfeather points out that a huge volume of work is still done on a voluntary basis by members.

In the intervening years, the NPCP team has worked hard to weld the organisation into a high-profile body which provides a range of valuable services. It has become a major player in the educational field and is the first port of call for anyone canvassing the views of parents. The council now boasts branches in every county, including four in Dublin and two in Cork.

Currently, 1,000 parents' associations are affiliated to the NPCP. However, with 3,200 primary schools in the country, it's clear that many schools are still without parent representation. Some schools, Kilfeather notes, are reluctant to set up associations. "Part of our work is about telling and selling" she observes.

The NPCP is unique in Europe. "In most countries services for parents are developed by education boards or teachers organisations," Kilfeather explains. "Here they are developed by parents for parents."

Top of the NPCP's list of achievements is its parents' education and training programme, which trains trainers to help parents set up and operate associations in schools. Each region has a team of trainers and a mentor.

Another vital service is the NPCP help-line which is operated by volunteers. "We get up to 70 phone calls every day. There's nowhere else for parents to go and it's difficult for them to access information." Enquiries include requests for information on the curriculum, on homework or problems with bullying, suspensions, access to schools and classroom practices. Some parents have serious difficulties going on over a number of years.

"We help parents to make the best decisions about their children's education and show them the way to go about dealing with an issue. Some people are nervous about writing letters. We ensure that they are not libellous and are designed to produce results." Such attention to detail can, she notes, be very time consuming.

Over the past 10 years, the NPCP has had a significant influence on education policy and curriculum development. Partnership in education has become something of a buzz phrase in recent times, but it is groundbreaking, Kilfeather points out.

"Ireland is way ahead of other OECD countries in terms of curriculum development and partnership in education," she says. Parents, for example, have had a significant input into the development of the RSE curriculum. The NPCP is involved in training the trainers and examining how policy will be developed with parents in each school before the programme is taught.

The new school board of management arrangements are similarly innovative. "The democratisation of the primary school system has gone ahead thanks to former Minister for Education Niamh Breathnach," Kilfeather notes. The new type of boards of management - to include two parents, two patron's nominees, the principal and an elected teacher and two community representatives - was freely and openly negotiated between parents, teachers and patrons, she says. "It wasn't enforced through legislation but by negotiation."

Elections to boards are currently taking place. A further benefit, she says, is the fact that young children are able to see democracy inaction from an early stage.

The fact that Ireland lacks a tradition of educational partnership presents problems. "More training is needed for both teachers and parents to help them work together," says Kilfeather. The NPCP has embarked on a series of projects designed to give teachers, parents and children the opportunity to work together."

In one pilot project a teacher and a trainer are being trained as a team to work with parents and teachers together.

For the future, the NPCP plans to extend the concept of partnership to children. "We must make schools as democratic as possible," she argues. "Children's rights are important and parents have to become more aware of that. It's vital that we fully equip our children to operate in a democracy."