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Irish Times
26-05-2025
- General
- Irish Times
It is a great honour to be school principal – but the role is no longer sustainable
As the secondary school year draws to a close, the sixth year graduation is centre stage for many, including for school principals. There is something very special every year for principals in watching students cross the threshold from adolescence into young adulthood having witnessed their growth not only in knowledge but in character, confidence and purpose over the years. To be a secondary school principal in Ireland today is both a great honour and a formidable responsibility. It is a vocation as much as it is a profession. Principals are called to be pedagogical leaders and visionaries, administrators and crisis managers, policy implementers and student advocates. At the heart of the principal's role lies the responsibility of leading teaching and learning. This is not an abstract or titular role. Rather, it is a strategic responsibility focused on improving the quality of education and shaping the educational culture of the school where meaningful learning can take place and students can engage with new ideas, challenge themselves and develop as thinkers, collaborators and creators. Principals must lead by example, model reflective practice and ensure that student learning remains the core currency of the school community. Their task is to foster an inclusive learning environment where every student can flourish. They must lead a school culture where teachers are empowered and feel supported and where the continuous professional learning of staff is valued as central to student achievement. The principal is called to serve as a guardian of possibility. READ MORE But none of this can be meaningfully addressed when basic structural needs in leadership support go unmet. Principals operate every day in a chasm between the political rhetoric of student-centred education and the reality of an underfunded, understaffed and overburdened system. In recent years, the role of the principal has become overwhelmingly unsustainable. The exponential growth in policy demands, compliance requirements, procedural documentation and scrutiny from external inspections has displaced educational leadership from the core of school leadership. Instead of being able to focus on teaching and learning, principals are increasingly consumed by health and safety audits, GDPR compliance, legislative updates and policy implementation from circulars that arrive weekly, often with little or no notice. The reality is that principals are now expected to be CEOs, CFOs, HR directors, compliance officers and facilities managers, all while leading learning, managing behaviour, supporting parents and safeguarding children. To add to it all, the school inspectorate, while important in maintaining standards, unnecessarily amplifies the administrative pressure because they do not see that the lived reality of school leadership cannot be captured in checklists. In recent years, successive education ministers have been tone deaf on the issue of support for school leadership giving no provision to reduce administrative workloads (quite the opposite), no new funding for additional deputy principals and no specific measures to address the growing strain on school leaders who are struggling to manage under-resourced systems which is severely taking its toll. Principals are being asked to lead the new senior cycle reform which is both philosophically and practically contentious. Photograph: iStock In the recent Irish Post-Primary School Leaders' Health and Wellbeing three-year longitudinal Deakin University study , nearly 45 per cent of post primary school leaders reported experiencing high to severe levels of burnout, while stress levels were higher than those of the general workforce. The study gave an alarming insight into the pressures faced by principals and deputy principals. Disturbingly, the report illustrated the scale of workplace violence in schools, including bullying and threats facing principals and deputies. Female school leaders are particularly affected, with reported cases of physical and cyberbullying showing marked increases over the past three years. Compounding this is the sharp decline in applications for school principal positions. Increasingly, capable and committed teachers are choosing not to pursue leadership roles because the personal, emotional and professional costs are too high. The role of principal is no longer seen as attractive or sustainable and this poses a threat to the quality and continuity of school leadership in the country. Despite all of this, principals are being asked to lead the new senior cycle reform which is both philosophically and practically contentious. Many principals support the intention to move towards broader, more authentic assessment. However, the lack of clear guidance, adequate resourcing and systemic readiness alongside unresolved concerns about equity and reliability and the place of AI, make this a deeply problematic reform to lead at school level. Once again, the burden of implementation falls on school leaders who are already stretched beyond capacity. Principals are not martyrs. They are professionals. Their resilience should be honoured but not assumed. Their vocation should be supported but not taken for granted. Leadership in schools does not and cannot rest on the shoulders of one individual. The role of the deputy principal is crucial. However, the current allocation model for deputy principals is both outdated and unfit for purpose. It ignores the reality on the ground which is that schools are larger, more diverse, more accountable and significantly more complex than when the original staffing thresholds were conceived. The rigid threshold model based on enrolment figures grossly oversimplifies school leadership needs. In their pre-Budget submission 2025, the Joint Managerial Body (JMB) set out an unarguable case for the enhancement of leadership capacity at deputy principal level. Their position was widely supported by other relevant stakeholders and by the other post-primary management bodies. Enhanced deputy principal provision is also at the forefront of the JMB 2026 pre-budget submission. It is important to note that this is not just a resource issue. It is a moral one. A government that publicly champions wellbeing and educational excellence cannot continue to ignore the human cost of neglecting its school leaders. Principals are not martyrs. They are professionals. Their resilience should be honoured but not assumed. Their vocation should be supported but not taken for granted. We need systemic reform that acknowledges the complexity of the work of school principals and provides the necessary structures to support it. We need the kind of policymaking that listens to and learns from those who know the realities on the ground. If the Government is serious about sustaining high-quality education in our schools, then it must act now through the Department of Education to support school leadership by: revising the deputy principal allocation mode; providing additional administrative support; investing in building sustainable leadership teams and recognise that quality leadership is not a luxury but is a prerequisite for school success. Anything less is a failure of leadership at the highest level. John McHugh is principal of Ardscoil Rís in Dublin 9
Irish Times
12-05-2025
- Irish Times
Disruptive students are being enabled to cause mayhem in classrooms
So many parents and teachers leave a principal's office feeling firewalled over the behaviour of a small cohort of hardcore, disruptive students. Why? Let's get the obvious out of the way first. The principal of a school does the Department of Education's bidding. Lacklustre consequences for hardcore disrupters is hardly in the interests of the main body of students, never mind the morale of the teaching staff, who witness a merry-go-round of ineffective dead-ends posing as 'consequences'. So, what is the problem with identifying these students as being the bane of everyone's educational life? Why are they being enabled to cause mayhem? Come into a secondary school in Ireland and you'll find out. In order for a consequence to justify calling itself a consequence, it needs to be something that matters to the recipient. And this is where the Government is failing the vast majority of students. READ MORE The 'blue book' (a weeklong naughty or nice list) is the end of the line on discipline, along with an equally irrelevant detention booking. Save for a drug-related or sexual offence committed by a student, discipline in Irish secondary schools is a merry-go-round of nonsense. Thankfully, the majority of students are fine individuals and don't test that theory too much. [ No phones, no slouching, no excuses: Britain's strictest teacher has lessons for Irish schools Opens in new window ] It's a sad reality that in the world of 2025, Ireland has a small cohort of highly problematic students in our schools who are known to gardaí. How effective do you think a 'blue book' of teachers declaring whether a student of this type was naughty or nice is to these kinds of students? It's a week-long sticking plaster, if even that. Year heads throughout the country have no other tools at their disposal. Sadly, as long as they've ticked the box of the blue book, many of them don't care. They have been numbed by their lack of autonomy on discipline and their immediate boss's need to have a clean look for the school (on paper). The result is that these hardcore disrupters are being pinged back into the learning space to dismantle student and teacher morale and disrupt the learning of the main body of students – with absolutely no change in their actual behaviour. This uninspired one-size-fits-all approach to discipline is the Department of Education's preferred approach. It believes it is the right thing to do because hardcore disrupters are entitled to an education. The problem is that their purpose in coming to school is the polar opposite of getting themselves an education (but we'll not say too much about that in case we upset them). Don't believe me? When was the last time you heard of a parent successfully bringing an action against a school over safety concerns for their child? For every injustice a student receives in our education system that actually makes it into the public domain or the High Court, there are thousands more who were firewalled by the school leadership team. Many of these parents reading this article today may be feeling terribly alone. I'm here to tell you, you're not alone. Teachers, too, have been silenced on behaviour concerns. Reprisals from the school's senior leaders or the hardcore disrupter's family are often the reasons why a teacher gives up. Have a listen out for how many classes your child has had supervised, or how many teachers are out sick, and you'll get a good idea of the culture at the school. If your child doesn't like going to school, you can take some comfort from the state of the teaching staff's attendance. Teachers' absences, sicknesses and resignations are a direct performance review for the principal and his or her deputies. Your child's not crazy; your child is not necessarily abnormally anxious; they are not being protected, and they can pick up on that. Perhaps it's time to target our anger at the generals who devised a one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with discipline. We all know that doesn't work, ever, but it's cheap Can we all agree there is zero point in shooting the foot soldiers? It is easy to take things out on teachers, but they are not in a position to change their directives. We may even be targeting principals unfairly as they, too, are simply following orders, though many of the more humane ones find ways to protect the students and their staff from the ineptitude of current discipline policy. It's time for every secondary school in Ireland to have a 'learn to learn' room. The type of non-stop disruption we are dealing with from a certain cohort of students needs its audience taken away from it. These students thrive on the damage they cause being witnessed. Being taught basic manners including 'please' and 'thank you', putting their chair in after themselves, understanding the importance of punctuality and a strong work ethic are perfectly reasonable expectations. And they could learn that in the 'learn to learn' room – without the spectators they so rely on. Perhaps it's time to target our anger at the generals who devised a one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with discipline. We all know that doesn't work, ever, but it's cheap. [ Former teacher at prestigious Dublin school claims she was penalised after raising concerns about student discipline Opens in new window ] If you are a parent who has fallen foul of this, please know the teachers are your friends. In fact, when you think about it, the parents and teachers are the only two groups of people whose sole interest is the student and a happy school. Every single other stakeholder has their finger in another pie or two. Is it time to reinvent the parent-teacher association, to take it away from bake sales and towards a policy watchdog? We need to challenge the sterile, anaemic approach to protecting the school community from those who are there to do it harm. It takes courage to stop pretending something isn't true. There are plenty of warning signs right now that things need tightening up. Does Minister for Education Helen McEntee have what it takes to act?
