Sir, – The crisis in school leadership which John McHugh (Letters, January 6th) describes has been growing apace for about two decades now. The most significant impact, as he points out, is that principals have less and less time to devote to core functions of schools which are teaching and learning. Instead they are increasingly required to attend to bureaucratic and management tasks, many of which arise from demands devised by the Department of Education itself.
Teachers, as a rule, do not have any ambition to spend most of their time attending to these sorts of items. This, together with reports of the stress being suffered by many current principals, mean that fewer skilled and experienced educationalists will apply for leadership positions. Indeed, the anecdotal evidence is that this pattern has been the case for some years now. This situation is not in the interests of those attending or working in our schools. The Department of Education, in various publications, insists that the role of school principal is a key one.
In that context, is it not about time that it initiated a genuinely independent review of the role? – Yours, etc,
BRIAN FLEMING,
Ann Ingle: Deliberately going out of my way to move for no particular reason has never appealed to me
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Palmerstown,
Dublin 20.
