84% of teaching principals had considered stepping down from their position while 70% of principals reported mental health issues as a direct result of their job.
Those are some of the stark findings of a major report that has been issued following a survey of 500 working principals by the National Principals Forum.
The National Principals’ Forum (NPF) is a grassroots lobby group of primary school principal teachers, established in May 2018 that seeks to work with the Minister for Education, management bodies and representative bodies to affect urgent changes needed to sustain principals in their roles as school leaders.
The last time the role of principal was examined or quantified by the Department of Education (DES) was 1973. The NPF say the role, as it currently exists, in no way reflects school leadership in the 21st Century. The Report called A Critical Analysis of Supports for Children with Additional Needs, and their School Leaders in Irish Primary Schools National Principals’ Forum May 2021 also found that 84.4% of schools surveyed have seen an increase in pupils with additional educational needs (AEN) in the past 4 years.
Despite the significant increase in AEN students a staggering 72.2% of those school’s report that their current Special Education Teaching allocation does not meet the needs of additional needs children in their schools.
Alarmingly, 70.5% of Special School principals reported that they felt a child, or a staff member, were in danger because a particular child was refused access to SNA provision.
Commenting on the Report, Independent TD for Laois Offaly Carol Nolan, herself a former Gaelscoil Principal, said the findings have confirmed the scale of a crisis that has been left to deepen over many years:
“While it is absolutely clear that we must do all that we can to support children with additional educational needs in schools, and help them to flourish, we must also accept that overwhelming those in positions of leadership is not going to achieve anything. At the moment we have a system where parents and schools are in open conflict with each other around the allocation of special needs resources when the reality is that it is the department and successive governments that have created a deeply unworkable system that is ultimately serving no one. Our children deserve to have their needs met in a timely manner, but our teaching principals are now at breaking point and that again highlights how dysfunctional the entire system has become. If school leadership breaks down through burnout and lack of resources, then all children are adversely impacted. We cannot allow that to happen.”