The Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, has challenged teachers' claims about growing indiscipline among pupils and has said the issue should be resolved through existing structures.
The Minister, who addressed the Teachers' Union of Ireland annual congress in Galway yesterday, conceded that discipline was an issue common to all three teachers' unions.
However, Mr Dempsey told journalists that he "remained to be convinced" about the merits of a TUI proposal to set up a specific commission on discipline.
"Discussion and debate is necessary, and parents have to be involved," the Minister said.
However, "clearly laid out" school policies on behaviour should allow for difficulties to be tackled, he said.
He would not like the impression to be "created" that indiscipline was a major problem, given that a figure of 2 per cent of all pupils had been cited at the recent Your Education System (YES) meetings, he added.
In his address to delegates, the Minister reiterated his commitment to league tables or "information on schools", as he said he preferred to describe it.
He did not believe that there were major differences between himself and the TUI on this issue, even though the union had expressed its opposition.
"I have no intention of following the bad examples in other countries," Mr Dempsey said, appealing for an "honest debate" on the issue, and a co-operative approach to identify "models of good practice". Such a model "must have regard to a school's contribution to the academic, pastoral and social needs of the student", he said, and must take account of "all school-sponsored activities, and not just those of an academic nature".
"It must also take account of the difficulties in the school's student cohort and how well schools are resourced," Mr Dempsey said.
"In doing this, it must allow for the fact that achievement in school is influenced by a wide range of factors, and, in particular, the socio-economic background of its students.
"The true test of a measure of school effectiveness is that it treats as equally valuable the success of the less academically able student. We have a clear choice in this area," he warned.
"We allow an information vacuum to be filled by simplistic and unbalanced data, as is the case at present, or we fill this vacuum with meaningful, fair and informative material for everybody," he said.
This year, the Government was investing over €550 million on combating educational disadvantage, the Minister continued. He would be finalising a new policy approach shortly to identify those schools where disadvantage was endemic and apply resources in a "prioritised" way.
The policy would also embrace a "single, integrated strategy", encompassing pre-school, primary, post-primary and alternative provision for those whose needs were not being catered for by the formal educational system, he said. And it would move away from the concept that "one size fits all", and accept the reality that the traditional school model was simply not working for some children.
Responding to a TUI call for implementation of the McIver Report on further education, the Minister said the costs of implementation would be very significant, and the recommendations could only be implemented on a phased basis. Steps were already being taken to implement one of these recommendations - on a council of further education, he said. Referring to the controversial "cap" on the post-Leaving Certificate sector, the Minister said enrolment in the sector now stood at almost 30,000 students.
The TUI president, Mr Derek Dunne, told the Minister that the union was "utterly opposed" to league tables. Mr Dunne also said the cap on post-Leaving Certificate courses in VECs would stunt the growth of this area, and would "target" the VEC sector alone.
He also called on Mr Dempsey to reverse the funding cuts applied to institutes of technology and ensure there were sufficient monies for benchmarking.