The leaking of that Department of Education plan, which would see principals playing a key role in assessing teacher, could hardly have come at a less auspicious time for the Marlborough Street mandarins.
This weekend, all the senior figures from the department are due to attend the annual conference of the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals (NAPD). The conference, now a key event in the annual education calendar, takes place at Lyrath Estate in Kilkenny, the glitzy hotel featured in RTÉ's fly-on-the-wall series Five Star.
School principals, already overburdened with teaching, administrative and managerial tasks, are less than enthused about being asked to take on a role as some kind of teacher inspector. Expect some lively exchanges over the petits-fours!
The conference will also mark the departure of Mary McGlynn (right) as director of the NAPD. We wish her well. (See interview with NAPD president, Patricia McDonagh, on opposite page).
What's the worst thing about the standardised school year?
You guessed it - the blatant rip off by the airlines of those planning a well earned mid-term break.
Fancy a break in Malaga during the forthcoming break at the end of this month? That will be (gulp) €309 one way from Malaga to Dublin on November 2nd/3rd - the day teachers and parents want to fly back.
But if you fly a week earlier you can fly for €39 one way.
Incidentally, Ryanair is almost as bad, charging up to €199 one way during the mid-term break.
It makes us nostalgic for the days when every school arranged its own holidays - and when teachers and parents could enjoy a relatively cheap mid-term break. Give us back the idiosyncratic, unco-ordinated school year!
The OECD's recent Education at a Glance report received plenty of attention in the media here.
But here's a question: What Irish education organisation would roll out a 400-page document to the Irish education sector without any specific background paper?
To compound the irritation in Irish education circles, the OECD enclosed special briefing papers for a huge number of OECD countries but Ireland, for some reason, was not deemed worthy of this treatment.
