The Minister for Education, Mr Martin, has announced that he has received Government approval for a new Education Bill to replace the draft legislation proposed by the previous rainbow government. The new Bill excludes the earlier legislation's central element, the setting up of regional education boards.
"The Minister is of the view that such an intermediate administrative tier is unnecessary and would not deliver advantages commensurate with its cost", according to yesterday's statement from the Department of Education. "The priority for the Minister and the Government is to channel such resources as are available for education directly into schools and other education institutions."
The purpose of the new Bill is the more limited one of putting the Department of Education's activities on a statutory basis for the first time since the State was founded.
It will provide for the establishment of new, more democratic boards of management in all schools representing parents, teachers and mainly church-linked management bodies.
It will also place on a fully legal basis for the first time all the Department's regulations, rules and circulars concerning funding, including capitation grants, the inspection of schools, other school activities and national public examinations.
The new legislation will also put the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment on a statutory basis for the first time, thus giving the NCCA increased powers in drawing up, and having an input into, the implementation of the curriculum.
Last month the Minister also promised that the Bill would recognise the "professional status of teachers", which the teacher unions complained was absent from the previous government's Bill.
Mr Martin also said it would define the role of the school principal. "We are anxious to give solid status to the principal as the instructional leader in the school and to his or her role on the board of management", he said.
He also promised to scrap the clause giving the Minister for Education powers "to compel schools to adopt a certain board of management structure" and to withdraw funding from a school if it failed to establish that structure.
He said there would be a recognition in the Bill's general principles that education was not just schools-based but also involved "lifelong learning".
The Minister is to consult teachers, parents and management bodies to revise the appeals procedures in the original Bill.
He assured church bodies that the religious ethos of their schools would be guaranteed in the new Bill.