Schools need guidance on discipline policies: TUI

SCHOOLS SHOULD be given an explicit directive from the Department of Education to formulate codes of discipline, a new TUI document states. According to Alice Prendergast, TUI president, the document was drawn up in response to concern about an increase in minor and major incidents in schools.

Rose Malone, TUI education officer, says the union hopes every school will now produce its own code of discipline, and that this policy document will encourage schools that already have codes of discipline to re-assess and improve them. The TUI is asking the Department to mace it mandatory for every school to produce a code of discipline with defined criteria, she says.

The document was launched in Dublin last week by Sean Mac Gleannain, chief inspector with the Department of Education. He said that while the Department can set guidelines, individual school managements have discretion to work out the details that meet the requirements of their schools. He added that "the area of school discipline is one where individual rights and the demands of society meet".

The Department is to carry out a review of the existing discipline guidelines in consultation with the partners in education, he said, when the findings of a research project commissioned by the Department last year have been issued.

The research project will aim to redress a lack of data by identifying the extent of discipline problems in our educational system. It will also seek models of good practice, so the Department will have "a clear focus for a review" of the current guide-lines, he explained.

Teachers today "need to be adept at a variety of classroom techniques and they need to have presentation skills which hold the attention and interest of children of varying ability and interest", he said.

Mac Gleannain hoped the TUI document would help schools look to their own needs, he added. "There is a need for statements of policy/philosophy/ethos in relation to behaviour which really can be formulated best by the schools for themselves.