Way now clear for teacher fitness-to-practise hearings

There is a familiar flurry of pristine school uniforms, bulging school bags and squeaky new lunch boxes this week as children around the country return to their classrooms or step into the formal education system for the first time.

For parents it can be emotional, dealing with life’s milestones, logistical challenges and financial headaches, or just euphoria that their children are out of the house and back into a structured routine after the long holidays.

This summer, during that break, there was a significant development in Irish education. Since July, after a wait of 10 years for a part of enacted legislation to be commenced, the way is now clear for the Teaching Council to hold “fitness-to-practise” hearings.

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Daisy (5) with her father, Keith O’Connor, on her first day at school at Griffeen Valley Educate Together School, in Lucan, Co Dublin. Photograph: Eric Luke

The council has the power to remove a teacher from its register where it deems the person unfit to teach, including where this is for child-protection reasons. It is also charged with investigating underperformance or conduct issues, on foot of complaints from students, parents and teachers, among others.

All teachers paid by the State must be registered with the council. In mid-August there were 43,936 at primary-school level and 41,824 at secondary level on its books. (Teachers employed and paid by private schools do not have to register.)

However, for the vast majority of school-children and their parents, not to mention all the highly committed and competent teachers, this new arena of “last resort” will be of no personal relevance. But a proposed “parent and student charter” that is promised in its wake will affect everybody in the school community.

This charter has the potential to be “a really positive catalyst” within schools if it is received well and implemented well, says Áine Lynch, the chief executive of the National Parents’ Council (NPC), Primary – the level of education at which parents have most interaction with schools. She believes it could clarify everybody’s rights and responsibilities so that when parents have concerns or children are unhappy, the situation would be less likely to escalate to a formal complaint.

The Ombudsman for Children, Niall Muldoon, who has made the promotion of good complaints-handling in schools one of his office's key objectives over the next two years, agrees that such a charter should help parents, students and schools to improve ways of working together. Some 47 per cent of all complaints to his office in 2014 related to education; and three-quarters of those 768 grievances concerned individual schools.

“If you can improve on relationships, everybody knows what they are doing and everybody knows what is expected of them, that will be very, very positive and that will reduce complaints, but you will always have complaints,” he says.

The triggering of the "fitness-to-practise" mechanism has highlighted the lack of an agreed, standardised system for handling complaints at school level, yet local procedures are supposed to be exhausted before an issue is brought to the Teaching Council. The Department of Education and Skills has promised to address this gap, as part of more holistic guidance on parent-student-school relationships.

Under the Education Act of 1998, it was expected that procedures for handling complaints would be outlined for schools. But almost 20 years later, that hasn't happened and most primary schools still use a framework drawn up in 1993 by the Irish National Teachers' Organisation and the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association, with no input from parents or the Department of Education, as Lynch points out.

A Programme for a Partnership Government that was published last May promised it would “introduce a stronger complaints procedure and charter for parents”.

In response to a query from Health+Family, a spokesman for the Minister for Education and Skills, Richard Bruton, says he plans to seek Government approval "presently" for the Heads of Bill to replace the relevant Section 28 of the Education Act, which would then include principles that will govern how schools engage with parents and students.

“The legislation will provide the statutory basis for ministerial guidelines, which will form the framework for a Parents and Students’ Charter in every school following consultation with parents, students, recognised school management bodies and staff associations representing teachers and other appropriate bodies. Revised local complaint and grievance procedures will be a key part of the charter,” the spokesman adds.

The Teaching Council believes the existing systems at local level should be replaced by a statutory complaints procedure under the Education Act.

“There could be potential for complaints to be submitted to the council that could possibly have been resolved at school level,” it says.

While it is not aware what the proposed parent-student charter will contain, the council’s “primary concern is that an effective means of communications is in place to resolve issues that arise in schools from time to time involving students, parents and school staff and management”.

We are now on our third minister for education since the idea of a “parent and student charter” was first mooted by Ruairí Quinn in 2013. It is “absolutely essential” that such a charter is implemented as soon as possible, says Lynch. While ideally it would have been in place before the go-ahead for fitness-to-practise hearings, she says she would not have wanted the latter to have been delayed any longer.

The teaching profession is behind others such as the nursing, medical and legal professions in having such a mechanism to ensure standards are high, she says.

Lynch recalls “a very forward-thinking” 1991 circular from the Department of Education, when Mary O’Rourke was minister, on the need for partnership with parents, which stated that every national school would be required to have “a clearly defined policy for productive parental involvement”. However, the provisions of that circular didn’t seem to trickle down into schools.

When the NPC surveyed its members in 2012, just 17 per cent agreed that their school had a clearly defined, written policy document for productive parental involvement.

“This is why strengthening of legislation is needed to make sure this is implemented rather than just aspirational,” she says.

Having looked at how it's done in Scotland – where the guidance booklet for the Parental Involvement Act runs to 86 pages – and in the US, where certain funding is dependent on a school having a policy for parental involvement, the NPC believes there are weakness in both approaches.

“Anything that is required to be done to receive funding doesn’t get ‘buy in’, understanding and belief in what they’re doing, because it is ticking the box,” Lynch argues.

Nor does the NPC want lengthy legislation dictating what schools should do; rather it would like to see a parent-student charter enshrining principles and values, such as two-way communication, respectful understanding and transparency, and so on.

For busy parents who may feel their current level of involvement with schools is just fine, thanks, she makes it clear that the NPC is not suggesting we spend more time at the school.

“What the research does say is that when parents are involved in their children’s education, children will do better”, but it’s the nature of the involvement that is important.

“The biggest difference parents can make is around their children’s learning at home but parents are lost in that respect in many cases, unless there is a good relationship with the school and good communication.”

There also needs to be ongoing discussion around children’s abilities, expectations, setting goals for children – and those goals being realistic – and what parents can do at home to support the child’s learning in school.

However, she stresses, there is lots of “very, very positive work” being done in schools already around the relationships between the school, parents and the children.

“I think in certain circumstances, where a difficulty has arisen, it can be because of a lack of understanding of process and how to manage parents who have concern about their children or children who are unhappy in certain situations.”

The current complaints process can be quite difficult for parents to navigate, she says. Also it can be very hard for them to raise concerns and make complaints in a school when their child continues to be taught there, particularly “when there is a lack of clarity about where the parent stands, where the child stands, in that system”.

Muldoon is also keen to stress that the majority of schools are doing a good job and the majority of schools have got this right.

“The concern is always the 10 or 15 per cent where things may go wrong,” he says. And in schools where issues do arise, there is nobody checking to see if it had had the same procedures as the school up the road, could the problems have been averted.

“If you have poor policy, poor leadership and poor communication with parents, then you are going to have trouble but there is no standard to measure that against. Only when it goes wrong, do we realise local resolution isn’t working, or the policy wasn’t on the website, or parents making a complaint are being ignored, or the board of management is not meeting often enough.”

Muldoon also acknowledges how difficult it can be for parents to make a complaint in the first place. “School is such a personal experience for everybody, it is so intimate. If you’re in the only primary school in a small town and something goes wrong, the whole world knows about it. That’s why it is crucial to have proper guidance and proper policies and procedures in place.”

His experience is that so often it comes down to personal relationships. “That is why we work very hard on local resolution to get it done as soon as possible; the quicker it is resolved the better for everybody.”

The fostering of a positive relationship between schools, parents and children should allow for issues to be raised in a way that doesn’t intimidate the parent or hamper the child. “There are schools which never get to formal complaints because they do the informal so well.”

If Section 28 of the Education Act is to be replaced, it needs to provide for a strong level of consistency across all primary and secondary schools, says Muldoon.

“Inconsistency can lead to differences of outcome and that is something that is obviously not good practice anywhere,” he says. “Any business that had 3,500 branches would like to know that they doing the same thing in most places.”

swayman@irishtimes.com