Secondary school parents' organisations have expressed concerns about the newly agreed standardised school year, which they say does not suit their members.
Following Tuesday's announcement of the standard school year until 2008, the Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, said he was "confident that the new agreement can deliver for parents the certainty that they need in relation to school holiday periods."
However, according to Ms Barbra Johnston of the Catholic Secondary School Parents' Association, her organisation was not properly consulted by the Department of Education about the four-year agreement.
As a result, many of her members have found that the agreed school year does not fit in with their working lives.
"While the Minister may say that it is a grand step forward, I don't know what parents he consulted", she said. "The Christmas week should fit in with the major commercial two-week break, so that if parents are back to work, so are children."
Under the agreed school year, over the next four years schools will close for Christmas on either the 21st or 22nd December, depending on the year in question.
They will then re-open on either the 8th, 9th or 10th January, again depending on which year it is.
Ms Eleanor Petrie, president of the National Parents' Council (post-primary) said that while her organisation had attended meetings on the issue of parent-teacher meetings, it had been given little opportunity to contribute to the debate on the standard school year.
"If it was meant to help parents, they could have spent a bit more time talking to us about it," she said. "We would have liked to see the first week off entirely in the run-up to Christmas and a full week afterwards, in line with parents' work patterns."
However, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education said that the issue of standardisation was about giving certainty to families where children attended different schools, or where they had different variations in school holidays.
The means of facilitating standardisation was, she said, the Teachers' Conciliation Council, of which parents' groups were not a member.
Primary teachers will receive their benchmarking payments on February 26th of this month, and not March 3rd as was stated in last Tuesday's edition of this newspaper. This was due to inaccurate information supplied to The Irish Times by the Department of Education.
Second-level teachers paid directly by the Department will receive their payments on March 3rd, with VEC teachers paid according to a letter circulated to their schools by the Department of Education.