THE DEPARTMENT of Education has identified 60 seriously underperforming schools.
Close to half this number still have serious weaknesses despite the intervention of a special school improvement group in the department. In some cases financial penalties were imposed on school boards of management in these schools.
Details of the group of schools were given publicly for the first time by the department’s chief inspector, Dr Harold Hislop, speaking at NUI Maynooth. In a wide-ranging address, Dr Hislop pointed to the need for greater accountability in Irish education.
He admitted that only two cases had been taken to date under new procedures for dealing with teachers who were consistently underperforming. The Republic, he said, was unusual in not having some form of regular teacher appraisal. He also pointed to the lack of robust self-review in Irish schools.
The school improvement group was established in 2008 to deal with instances of seriously underperforming schools. This intervention has led to various reforms, including changes to the management or staffing of schools; the provision of progress reports by the schools to the department; further inspection visits; and, in some cases, financial penalties on boards of management.
From April 2008 to the end of December 2011 the school improvement group dealt with a total of 60 schools (39 primary schools and 21 post-primary schools). Dr Hislop said the process had been effective in 36 cases.
He also said the school system has considerable work to do to improve the information that “we have available to us regarding the effectiveness of individual schools and the system more generally”.
“The most effective educational systems have good levels of quantitative and qualitative data to monitor student progression and achievement and to monitor the effectiveness of schools.”
However, Dr Hislop defended the ban on school league tables. These, he said, tended to reflect the socioeconomic background of students in a school rather than the impact of teaching.
On teacher appraisal, he pointed out that in many countries, the principal as the school’s instructional leader, conducted regular formal reviews of the work of teachers.
“I would not argue for process-heavy or overly bureaucratic systems of teacher appraisal in Irish schools but I would argue that a school culture in which principals monitor the work of other teachers would be beneficial,” he said.
On the new arrangements for teacher underperformance, he said the penultimate stage of the process required an independent report on teacher performance from the inspectorate.
“By the end of 2011, two such cases had been received by the inspectorate; one has concluded and a second is well advanced.
“While we are in the early days of the implementation of the new process . . . it appears that a combination of external regulation and inspection combined with internal self-regulation is beginning to work.”
Dr Hislop said he had no interest in seeking to “explain away” the decline in standards of achievement noted in OECD/Pisa results on literacy and numeracy; these showed a sharp decline in standards in Irish schools.
He said he welcomed how the results “helped to shake us out of a sense of complacency about standards in Irish schools and provided strong arguments for continued investment in education”.
