For your submission I am focusing on just one area, that of the Board of Management and the Principal.
As a primary school principal I am responsible for everything and everybody. I am the human resources department, the accounts department, data protection officer, compliance officer, health and safety officer, administrator, maintenance officer, child protection officer, timetable and diary keeper and sympathetic ear to the entire community.
Oh and I direct teaching and learning in my spare time.
If anything goes wrong every one looks at the principal and wonders what happened. But what about The Board? Don’t they have ultimate responsibility, you might ask.
The Board of Management are spoken about in circulars and Department directives as if they were the board of directors in a private company with a salary and expenses to match.
In reality they are a group of (usually) lovely but unpaid volunteers who do not have the expertise, training or time to perform any of the tasks allocated to them. They do not have a sense of their own legal responsibility and look to the principal for guidance on every matter.
Most schools have to plead with people to sit on the Board and the principal has to direct them. No sooner have we cobbled together a sort of group to work together than they are disbanded and the whole process starts all over again. The principal has full responsibility for overseeing this process.
In most schools the principal IS the Board. This is a most lethal position to be in from a legal perspective. As principals we are sitting ducks who are trying to keep all the eggs warm at once.