PPTA ban on ERO 'counterproductive'

A Post Primary Teachers Association decision to refuse to co-operate with the Education Review Office would harm school students, according to the Minister responsible for the Education Review Office, Brian Donnelly.

Mr. Donnelly said that the teacher's union had over-reacted to the comments of the Chief Review Office, Dr. Judith Aitken.

"Teacher competence is a complex issue; certainly more complex than the simple 'more Government money will fix the problem' reaction so common of pressure groups," Mr. Donnelly said.

"It is more than the examples of gross incompetence that are dealt with through the procedures laid down in the teachers' Collective Employment Contract."

"Teachers need a range of competencies that may vary from school to school. A key one is the ability to assess students' learning needs and plan teaching programmes accordingly. So a teacher who could be considered incompetent in one school might be considered competent in another. Even within the same school a teacher may be competent in one area of the curriculum but not in another."

"ERO does not assess teachers' performance, in the way the old inspectorate did. Schools now have to do that for themselves."

"Part of the problem is that, until this year, there was no standard method of assessing teachers' performance and some schools had no idea how to do it. That was why the Government introduced a Performance Management System at the beginning of this year, which schools have to use."

However, Mr Donnelly said that ERO has found that incompetence was a combination of poor teaching practices and poor management.

In 1996 ERO had to do follow up reviews on 116 (13%) of the 923 schools it reviewed that year. By the time of the follow up reports, 75 (65%) of these 116 schools had improved their performance satisfactorily in line with the earlier ERO evaluations. ERO had to do a second follow up report on ten schools.

The main reason for follow up reports during 1996 was poor curriculum management in the school. In most cases this was related to the poor performance of the principal or the Board of Trustees. In particular, poorly managed schools:

• failed to deliver a balanced curriculum (the more difficult because balance is not defined in the national curriculum);
• had poor planning, delivery,
• and/or monitoring of programmes; and
• poor student learning assessment and poor teaching/programme evaluation.

These schools also failed to:

• promote high levels of staff performance, including implementing teacher appraisal systems;
• document how the National Education Guidelines are being implemented; and
• maintain an ongoing programme of self-review.

"People often don't know what they don't know. The major advantage of ERO reviews is that they give schools a lot of good information about their performance."

"The fact that 87% of schools do not require follow up reviews shows that the vast majority of them are on the right track. A ban would deprive schools of valuable feedback on how their systems are working."