Publishing league tables doing 'untold damage', says TUI

They are a small minority, a "canker" in the educational system. They are more frequently vulgar, defiant and their "antics" are no longer of a "low level, insidious" nature.

Pupils? Teachers? Managers who won't face up to indiscipline? No, just those dreadful newspapers which chose to publish school league tables last year.

"Salivating" was how TUI president Derek Dunne described such publications, as they waited in anticipation for further blessing from the Minister. "Untold damage" had been done to schools by particular newspapers already, he said. "The issue is that if we construct a set of comparative tables and include a range of indicators, newspapers will extract the juicy bits and highlight the worst school in Ireland, the best school etc . . ." The Minister wouldn't be drawn on that one, clearly committed to the idea of league tables - or "information on schools" as he said he preferred to describe it. However, he did have his own jab at the media during yesterday's TUI congress, which was dominated by the indiscipline issue. It came during his defence of his decision to send out the Department inspectorate at Christmas - a decision which the TUI president had described as simply "wrong".

"I'm not going to go back over that. I made my position clear," the Minister said. "I have been blamed for a lot of things, but I don't write newspaper headlines and I don't produce the Joe Duffy Show." The TUI president was quick to retort.

"You may not write the newspaper headlines, Minister, but you sure do make them," he said, to resounding applause.

Headlines, perceptions and impressions were also a focus of contributors to an earlier debate on the TUI's new draft policy on discipline. "This is a positive document," Mr Derek Glynn, TUI assistant general secretary, told the delegates as he ran through the main points of the paper prepared by the union's second-level VEC sub-committee. There must be no "whimsy or arbitrariness" about the issue at hand, however, he said. Pervasive indiscipline, "undealt with by management", must be defined as a condition of service issue, he warned.

"Low level insidious indiscipline" was now of a more severe nature, he said, and teachers were witnessing more frequent defiance and incidents of vulgarity. Mr Glynn said the situation could no longer be tolerated. He urged delegates to respond so that the union's final policy could be with schools by next September.