Secondary schools could be facing a raft of legal actions from parents and pupils because school managers can no longer guarantee adequate levels of supervision, a conference was told yesterday.
Many schools have inadequate supervision at break and lunchtimes and cannot meet t heir legal requirements under health and safety legislation, according to the general secretary of the Association of Management of Catholic Secondary Schools (AMCSS), Mr George O'Callaghan.
Addressing the organisation's annual conference in Galway, he said the Department of Education urgently needed to spend £6 million on ancillary staff for supervision at break-times.
He said that while many teachers helped with supervision, it was done voluntarily and could not always be relied upon. He said this was because teachers were not always available and might be on in-service courses. Too often, supervision duties were falling on principals and deputy principals, he said.
They were so stretched performing other tasks they found it difficult to carry out proper supervision in many cases, he said. Consequently, there was a shortage of staff to supervise, and health and safety were being seriously compromised.
Mr O'Callaghan said the £6 million would pay for four people on average to supervise lunch and morning breaks during the school year.
He said school boards of management were "more and more concerned with the question of legal responsibility to their students and staff in the context of the health and safety legislation". This concern was against a background of an "increasingly litigious nature of school/parent/ pupil interaction".