Parents may have to wait until 2019 for inspection reports on every school in the country to be made available, it was claimed yesterday.
According to Fine Gael's Olwyn Enright, with 300 whole school evaluation (WSE) inspections taking place each year, it will take 13 years for over 4,000 schools to be evaluated.
While the decision to publish reports was a welcome one, their release demonstrated many shortcomings in the way it is presented and the timescale for evaluation of schools, she said.
However, speaking in Cork yesterday, Minister for Education Mary Hanafin said her department hopes to publish around 1,000 school inspection reports each year. Only some of these would be WSE reports, she acknowledged.
Although it did not surprise her that many of the reports were extremely positive, she believed they did not shy away from criticism of schools when they saw deficiencies.
"We would envisage publishing about 1,000 reports a year - a lot of those will be whole school evaluations at both primary and second level and others would be subjects reports," she said. "Some schools might have a subject done one year and others might have a whole school evaluation done."
Labour's education spokeswoman Jan O'Sullivan also claimed yesterday that there were "major improvements" required in the school inspection reports.
"The information that has been included is itself not very clear," she said. "Overall these reports do go some way to address an information deficit . . . but there needs to be a major improvement."