Whole school evaluation and global warming - the links

Teaching Matters: So, the INTO membership has decided to hand Minister for education Mary Hanafin her first major challenge. To be honest, I am not at all surprised that it concerns Whole School Evaluation (WSE), or to be accurate, the publication of the inspectors' reports.

While we have become more and more used to publication of reports on say, childcare facilities and nursing homes, it is still difficult to find any equivalent to what is being suggested for teachers.

Take the case of a childcare facility. It will either be a community or business initiative, operating within strict guidelines. While we may turn green as we realise that babies are being changed on the same tables where the toddlers later eat lunch, when such a facility is taken to task, it is a case of "fair cop, gov".

However, there is something very odd about the situation facing teachers. At the moment, education is facing ever greater challenges, as increasing numbers of pupils are identified as having special needs, as more and more children from countries other than Ireland enter our classrooms, and as the vast social changes in Ireland manifest themselves as serious discipline problems in a significant minority of pupils. All of this demands a huge injection of resources and training. Yet WSE is taking place under the auspices of the employer that has administered the under-provision of resources. It is also the employer that has seriously neglected the professional development of its employees, resulting in teachers resorting to taking courses in their own time and often at their own expense.

The four elements that are examined in WSE are the quality of school management, of school planning, of teaching and learning, and of support for pupils. One would have thought that an employer would bear a lot of responsibility for providing resources and training for all four.

Take just one, the quality of support for pupils. Schools have been begging for more guidance counsellors and resource teachers. In relation to pupils with special needs, a recent ASTI survey showed that approximately 5 per cent of pupils have special needs. However, out of 177 schools surveyed, 89 per cent of the pupils identified as in need of help had not received formal assessment, simply because there is still a huge backlog in the National Educational Psychological Service (NEPS) due to understaffing. The surveyed principals said that there was a pressing need for whole staff training and almost 57 per cent of them said they had difficulty with accessing resources.

It is as if the owners of a creche neglected to train their staff to meet new requirements, or failed to provide them with adequate resources, and then evaluated the creche as if it had nothing to do with the bosses.

As a final touch, the results are published on the internet in a way that may make the staff members identifiable, but deflects all attention from the owners. Sure, the staff can post a disclaimer, but how much attention will be paid to that? All analogies limp, and there are obvious flaws in mine, but there is also an element of truth in my comparison of these imaginary creche owners and the Department of Education and Science. Could we drum up support for a WDE? A Whole Department Evaluation, that looks at the performance of the DES as experienced by schools?

While WSE presents a challenge to the Minister, it also presents a challenge to the teacher unions, which will be portrayed as denying parents their right to information. It is all too easy to spin this one as curmudgeonly teachers resisting all forms of evaluation and progress.

This is an issue where public support is vital, and a lot of it will depend on the communications skills of the unions. There is actually a reasonable case to be made about WSE, and not just because of the historic lack of provision of resources, or the chances of identifying teachers, but because the whole process is lop-sided. It is supposed to help schools function better, but in fact, most teachers suspect that it will simply lead to increased global warming, as ancient forests are lopped to provide the paper that is demanded in these inspections.

The public understands that kind of thing very well, because it is rampant in the business world, where a vast amounts of time can be spent in producing paperwork that actually adds little to the business concerned. Schools also need to start showing real examples of the kind of information they routinely make available to parents. Some schools have excellent, regularly updated websites, where a real sense of the school and its priorities are evident. However, I am conscious that as soon as I talk about websites there are hapless computer teachers all around the country who realise that they are the ones who will be expected to set up and maintain such sites as just another part of their overloaded brief.

In recent times, a grand amalgamation of the three teacher unions was mooted. It is hard to see that happening, not least because the internal style of each union is quite different. However, this is one case where they need to be of one mind and voice, because now the fight is about something already conceded, which is never an easy one to win.

Breda O'Brien is a teacher at Dominican College, Muckross Park, Dublin