You can’t deliver great schools without great school leaders

I was a primary school principal teacher for nearly 20 years. I have an intimate understanding of the role. School leaders are the cement that holds a school together. Over the past decade, marked by an avalanche of new initiatives, our school leaders have been put under extreme pressure.

Our primary schools are in a constant state of evolution, seeking to keep pace with the modern world. Strategic school leadership plays a critical role in managing this change within schools.

Many of the pupils in our primary schools are from a new generation, generation alpha. They have never lived in a world without smartphones, drones, tablets, apps and a wide array of modern devices which provide new pathways for learning and development.

It's imperative that adequate training and development is available to school leaders

As educators, we are tasked with guiding these capable, intelligent children to prepare for challenges we can’t fully foresee. Modern school leaders must face these challenges head on, with enthusiasm. That’s easier said than done when many of our principals spend endless hours engaged in paperwork and our teaching principals still don’t have a minimum of a day a week to engage in leadership and management within their schools.

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There are some tough choices to be made in the year ahead starting with Budget 2020. The Government can choose to invest in our future, restoring critical supports for school leaders, including establishing assistant principal posts in large schools and a minimum of one leadership and management day per week for our teaching principals in small schools.

It can choose to finally honour a now 12-year-old pay award to primary principals and deputy principals who continue to be paid less than their peers at second level. It can choose to empower schools with the leaders they deserve, ensuring we deliver a world-class education well into the future.

Building leadership capacity in schools should never be limited to mentoring and training principals and deputies. An intelligent and committed team who are on the same page is invaluable. However, with the axing of more than 5,000 assistant principal posts of responsibility in schools, the government has made life a great deal more difficult for school leaders to build the necessary support systems in which schools thrive.

Restoration

Being able to appoint assistant principals can make all the difference in our schools. In 2017 there was the first, and to date the only structured restoration of these posts of responsibility since the moratorium was introduced in March 2009. Almost a decade later our school leaders need these valuable supports to meet the ever-growing challenges of their roles.

At the Irish National Teachers' Organisation (INTO) Congress earlier in the year, we unanimously called for a comprehensive review of the terms and conditions of employment of our school leaders. Teaching principals in particular outlined how they have seen their own roles expand exponentially in recent years, with an increased workload, ever-more paperwork and additional child protection and data protection accountability measures. All this extra work and they still teach a class every day.

If our teaching principals are to be afforded the same opportunity to truly “lead” their schools, they must be granted, at an absolute minimum, one leadership and management day per week.

It's imperative that adequate training and development is available to school leaders, and formal training, though important, isn't the only approach. Last week the INTO convened a principals and deputy principals conference in Tullamore, focused on the theme of managing workload in schools. Such events enable school leaders to learn from one another and provide access to a network of like-minded professionals dealing with similar challenges.

We need to build on the work done in the induction of newly-appointed principals and ensure that all members of school leadership teams have access to good-quality training and CPD throughout their careers.

Staffing

The activities undertaken by school leaders need to be focussed on core issues – school development, leading teaching and learning, personal and peer development, leading improvement, managing the school and engaging with the school community.

However, we know that many principals go much further, managing both IT and maintenance issues in their school buildings and dealing with multiple external bodies.

Adequate staffing and funding will make all the difference. Every school should have access to a school secretary and caretaker. The primary capitation grant must increase so that our school leaders spend less time fundraising for basic necessities in their schools.

In December 2007 independent adjudicators recommended to government that primary principals’ and deputy principals’ allowances be increased.

The government reneged on the payment of that award at the beginning of the recession and during the intervening period the majority of school leaders had to contend with a series of pay cuts, the last of which will not be reversed until October next year. Despite suffering from that period of austerity, school leaders worked heroically supporting everyone else in their school communities.

Primary principals and deputies should have a common scale of allowances on par with our post-primary equivalents. It’s about fairness.

It’s said that you can’t build a great building on a weak foundation. You certainly can’t deliver great schools without great school leaders. Our pupils and teachers deserve better. Budget 2020 is an opportunity for the Government to show that it appreciates the work of our school leaders, who need vital supports to ensure that everyone in our primary school thrives.

John Boyle is INTO general secretary