Sheelagh Drudy has a point. These days, after months of industrial action, the public's perception of the teaching profession is at an all-time low. There is, though, another side to the coin. Most of us remain blithely unaware of all the truly terrific things that teachers are involved in during their working lives.

You only have to attend an education conference to discover countless committed teachers, passionate about their work and deeply concerned about their pupils. Drudy, UCD's professor of education, is critical of a media which concentrates on the trials and tribulations of teacher union conferences but ignores important professional conferences.

"There are so many education conferences throughout the year," she says. "Many of them - on the new curriculum, children with disabilities, educational research, the teaching of maths, streaming or multiple intelligences, for example - are of fundamental importance to what is happening in the classroom, yet they go unreported." As a result, the public remains ignorant of many facets of education and the role that teachers play.

Teachers, she says, are constantly examining, evaluating and researching their work with a view to improving the quality of education they deliver. They enrol, too, on professional development courses in their own time and at their own expense. People forget all that, she says.

Drudy is a passionate advocate of the pivotal role played by our teachers in our society. "Over the last 15 years, I have had close professional contact with more than 3,000 teachers - both on HDips and taking in-career professional development courses. Quite frankly, it's a pleasure and a privilege to work with them. These are the people who have facilitated all the changes in schools. They are an enormously rich resource and don't get enough public validation. If teachers don't feel valued, they become demoralised."

A native of Boyle, Co Roscommon, Drudy attended primary school at the local Mercy Convent, but moved to Sligo to the Ursuline Convent for her secondary education. In terms of career, she recalls, the Ursulines gave their charges a sense of the importance of public service.

"A lot of girls from the school went into the caring professions - they became nurses, doctors and teachers. It was public service in its broadest sense. We were encouraged to believe that we should make a genuine contribution to society."

In the event, Drudy did arts at NUI Galway, majoring in sociology. "Like a lot of young people, I wasn't very clear about what I wanted to do," she says. "It was only when I graduated that I became more focused on education. I got a position as a research assistant on an early school-leavers' project. After that, I got into teaching and became interested in what was happening in schools and how schools related to the labour market."

By then, Drudy was in Cambridge, England, married (to PJ Drudy, now TCD's professor of economics) and teaching sociology at both convent and secondary modern schools. "The opportunity to teach sociology to children wasn't available in Ireland." A pity, she says, because it allows children to explore all the issues that remain important - inequality, work and education, for example - and allows them to develop vital critical skills.

"I'm delighted with CSPE and the Leaving Cert Applied's social education module, but I think there's still room for social science as a Leaving Cert subject," she says.

Following the birth of her first child, Drudy enrolled for a PhD on the transition from school to work at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, where she was already working on a Gulbenkian research fellowship. Interestingly, Lucy Cavendish College, which was established for mature women students, was named for Lucy Cavendish, the wife of the Lord Cavendish, Chief Secretary of Ireland, who was stabbed to death in Phoenix Park in 1882. During her widowhood, Lucy Cavendish developed an interest in education.

The Drudys returned to Ireland in 1980, and she got a job at the DIT teaching sociology. Keen to get back into an education department, Drudy applied for, and got, a lectureship at NUI Maynooth in 1986. Some 14 years later, she was appointed professor of education at UCD.

It was during her years at Maynooth that Drudy became involved in education policy. The 1990s were a time of enormous change in the education sector and Drudy played a role almost from the start. In 1992, she joined the HEA - in the lead-up to the Universities Act of 1997. She was appointed consultant to the Minister for Education on gender and equality issues for the Green Paper on Education.

In 1993, she worked as a member of the secretariat of the National Education Convention, which she describes as "driven by the inspiration of (Professor) John Coolahan". For Drudy, it was an exciting time. "I travelled the length and breadth of the country. The intensity of the discussion was enormous. Everyone was involved - parents, the IFA, the unemployed, the unions, Travellers, the management bodies, the bishops and the Department of Education were all presenting their views." The synthesis of these views became the source-book of the White Paper on Education in 1995, she says.

Currently, the UCD professor is chairing the task force on autism, set up by the Minister for Education and Science last October. The much-awaited report is due shortly. It will be, Drudy promises, "one of the most important reports to come out of the working groups".

While the task force's terms of reference focus on autistic children, the group had to factor into their debates the judgment in the Jamie Synnott case, she says. "It (the report) is of such huge importance to parents and their children and to the system. I hope that the report will be comprehensive in terms of the issues in relation to the provision of education for children with autism."

Factfile

Education:

Ursuline Convent, Sligo. NUI, Galway: BA sociology, MA sociology of education. University of Cambridge: PhD in education.

Family:

married to Professor PJ Drudy. Children: Aisling, who is training to be a teacher; Conor a student of sound engineering, and Aoife and David who are still at school.

Holidays:

family holidays in the west of Ireland and occasional trips abroad.

Hobbies:

reading, music, walking, cinema and theatre - when time permits.

Writers to relax with:

John le Carre and PD James.