...and more packs. Are they pests or pillars of progress?

AN AVALANCHE of educational packs has been arriving in schools all year. Material from organisations, such as the Tree Council of Ireland, the Irish Banks' Information Service (IBIS), Mobil Oil, Tesco, Norwich Union, the Society of St Vincent de Paul, Trocaire, the European Union and the Combat Poverty Ireland Agency has been coming fast and furiously through school letterboxes.

Commercial educational publishers must be dismayed at the flood of resource material which has been hitting our classrooms - most of it free. The diversity and worthiness of the material can leave teachers wondering if they should or should not incorporate it into a subject.

Many expensively produced packs end up sitting on shelves gathering dust. There is no structured monitoring by the Department. "Generally, it would be the schools themselves which would be the arbiters of what's suitable," says a spokesman.

Billy Fitzpatrick, education and research officer with the TUI, believes that there is a need for strict guidelines on what goes into schools. "There would be concern that commercial bodies particularly might be using it as a promotion thing alone without sufficient care being taken that it's of an educational nature," he says.

The Department of Education and Science should take some kind of role in this, says Fitzpatrick. "There's so much material now going into schools, together with the fact that the workload on teachers has mushroomed due to very worthwhile programmes, that it's very difficult for teachers to filter the stuff. Videos are particularly problematic because they are so time-consuming." However, he adds, "we don't want to make the school a total cocoon."

Moira Leydon, assistant general secretary/education research with the ASTI, says that teaching and resource packs "tend to be for use in areas which are cross-curricular - they do tend to be very useful for new programmes which have come in."

Every large corporate body in the country has produced packs for schools, she says, but "they do it conscientiously and diligently and involve teachers in the preparation of materials". A lot of ASTI people, she says, have contributed to these packs.

The packs are appreciated and valued by teachers, says Leydon. On the question of commercial bodies being involved in education, she says "it's a grey area but in terms of education provision it can be very useful". Besides, with the greater vocational emphasis of subjects, there has been a marked increase in the number of financial companies producing school packs.

On the whole, she believes, "resource packs meet a need. Some teachers find them so useful - they keep them and use them over and over again." The ASTI has produced its own range of packs in the past.

Kathryn Crowley, IT officer in the professional development unit of the INTO, believes there is "some wonderful stuff available but, unfortunately, it can go into a black hole, namely the principal's desk. And a lot of them just sit in the staffroom."

The best way to get packs used in schools, she says, is to target them and to introduce them to teachers at in-service training days. "It makes sense that they send one to every school, but the reality is that some brilliant resources can just sit there. But, when teachers are involved at the heart of a development, that's the best way - because they know how to root a pack in the curriculum."

Gerry Jeffers is co-ordinator of the Transition Year Curriculum Support Service (TYCSS), an initiative co-funded by the Department of Education and Science and the European Social Fund. "It's fundamental that the job is to devise a programme first," he says, "and then to use any resources available to support this programme rather than be resource-driven."

The TYCSS issues a resource checklist for teachers where they list the resources or packs that have arrived, that arrive and a list of new or forthcoming resources.

"There are not that many blatantly commercial," says Jeffers. "All the ones we have are what we would regard as of a model of co-operation between teachers and organisations. We have to recognise that they have an agenda but in many cases it's a legitimate agenda."

He points to a pack from the Plastics Industry Association and the Enterprise Encounter pack which links businesses in the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown area of Co Dublin with schools. Norwich Union also produced a pack which is used in Transition Year in business-related subjects.

Mobil Oil Ireland has produced Greensight, a resource pack about the environment. IBEC, the employer organisation, produces, a programme for senior-cycle students in Transition Year, the Leaving Cert Applied Programme and the Leaving Cert Vocational Programme.

THE rise and rise of educational packs and resources is "recognising that the teacher is the professional who is facilitating the learning in the classroom", says Jeffers. "In a fast-moving world, one of the drawbacks of standard textbooks is that there's a lot of content - but programmes such as Transition Year tend to emphasise process and learning skills. So, packs, where there are guidelines for teachers, are more appropriate.

"It's saying to teachers you have to be very well prepared for the structured activities you are going to have in your classroom," he says. In general, school work "is moving away from content only and exam oriented subjects to more skills-based ".