The Minister for Education, Noel Dempsey, has signalled that he favours giving parents more information about schools. But how much will be released? asks Seán Flynn, Education Editor

The signal from the Minister for Education, Noel Dempsey, that the ban on league tables may have been too extreme has unleashed a storm of protest from predictable quarters.

Within hours of the recent comments by Dempsey, the teaching unions were on the airwaves attacking the notion. The irony is that, privately, most senior union figures now accept that the obsessive secrecy surrounding the performance of schools is drawing to an end. Few are in favour of crude league tables, but most believe the current position is unsustainable.

So what is the position at the moment?

When the former education minister Micheál Martin moved to ban league tables six years ago, he played down the significance for parents. His message; if a parent wanted to see how a school was performing, they could simply have a chat with the principal.

Would that it were so simple. In my own experience, many principals regard Leaving Cert results as top secret information that they protect jealously. The idea of doling out this information freely to parents is, frankly, not on the agenda for most.

But there is a form of class discrimination here. If you are intent on sending your child to expensive fee-paying schools, you will have no difficulty securing information on exam results. Indeed, several of these schools, such as Blackrock College in Dublin, detail their exam success on the school website.

So what are parents to do if they want to find out what is going on?

Reports of school inspectors are not made available to the public even though 95 per cent of teachers are happy to co-operate with the inspectors, according to the Department. The good news is that despite this lack of accountability, the Irish education system works very well. Comparative league tables compiled by the OECD regularly place the Republic in the top rank. Most teachers and most schools are doing an outstanding job. But what about the minority who under-perform?

At issue is whether parents have a right to information about a school before they entrust their precious child to this institution.

Dempsey says he wants to make "an awful lot more information available. . . so that people can make real assessments and judgments. . . particularly parents".

At the moment, the decision to send - or not to send - a son or daughter to a particular school is made on local gossip, rumour and innuendo, some of it inaccurate and much of it unfair to schools or to individual teachers. Parents will talk loosely about "this school being on the rise" or of another being on the wane with little factual basis for these judgments.

Exam results, of course, only give part of the picture about how a school is performing. (Although the education system is quite happy to measure students solely on this basis.)

Most sensible parents also want to know about sport and drama and other extra-curricular activities in the school. Fundamentally, they want to know if their Joe or Mary will be comfortable in their new school environment.

Dempsey says parents have a "right to have a good idea of how a school performs across a whole range of indicators, not just exam results".

In a revealing interview on The Last Word on Today FM last week he said: "School league tables is an unfortunate shorthand [for his drive to allow more public information on schools] because it allows people who don't want any change to condemn it out of hand. I think what we need to do is to construct an information model about schools that is really meaningful, that is fair and fully rounded".

This, he said, would include information on a school's contribution to the academic, the pastoral and the social needs of students. It would reflect the extra-curricular activities underway in a school, its enrolment policy and its assistance for students with special needs.