Virtually all senior personnel in the Department of Education and Science will be reassigned to new posts in the next week.
In a radical shake-up of the Department special new "standing committees" on a range of policy issues are also to be established.
The changes - ordered by the Department's secretary-general, Mr John Dennehy - are designed to give the Department a sharper policy focus.
The changes are a response to a report by the former secretary of the Department of Finance, Mr Sean Cromien. The Cromien Report, published two years ago, was savagely critical of the Department notwithstanding the efforts of many overworked officials..
Mr Cromien said the Department was so overwhelmed with detailed day-to-day work that long-term strategic thinking was neglected.
"There is a feeling at every level that something is seriously amiss with the structure of the Department," he wrote. In what has become a landmark comment on the Department he wrote: "The urgent drives out the important".
Under the review, almost 30 officials at both assistant secretary and principal officer level are being reassigned.
Some of these have been doing the same job for long periods; sources say the Department needs to be "re-energised".
The standing committees are being established to give the Department a more pivotal role in policy formulation. In recent years there has been a tendency to farm out policy issues to task forces and expert groups. The Department hopes the standing committees will allow it to develop policy in a pro-active way.
The new policy drive comes as the Department divests itself of several traditional areas of responsibility.
A new independent board to run the State exams will be established shortly, while the National Educational Psychological Service is already up and running.
The Department is also in the process of devolving more power to regional centres as recommended by Mr Cromien.
Further change is likely shortly when responsibility for the higher education grant scheme may be handed over to the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs.
There is also a move towards greater transparency in the Department. Last month it published details of the school building programme for the first time.
It is hoped that these and other moves will lessen the amount of time spent by Department officials on Dáil questions, which take up a huge amount of their time.
When compared to other government agencies the Department of Education with less than 1,500 is lightly staffed.
Mr Cromien said that many officials in the Department did not have time to assess whether what they were doing was "being done properly, or indeed whether it is worth doing at all", the report says.
"There is a vagueness, caused by the absence of clear structures, about where in the Department policy is formulated and whose responsibility it is to formulate it," it declares.