2016 was an interesting year in primary education, and for me, it was the year where our education system changed fundamentally. The NCSE published their new guidelines for children with additional needs paving the way for the disaster that we are seeing today. Sean Cottrell, the powerhouse of the IPPN announced that he was going to be retiring leading to a new direction for the organisation of partnership with the INTO and Department of Education. But even more importantly for the purposes of this podcast episode were two elections - The Teaching Council elections and the INTO presidency election. How would this affect Droichead?

By 2015, it seemed like Droichead was going nowhere. The Teaching Council were doing their best to force schools to join their pilot, which almost nobody wanted to join and the INTO were doing their best to do the same. Already 3 years overdue, less than 5% of schools across the country had signed up. Something had to be done and many teachers on the ground had the answers. The thing was, would the Teaching Council listen?

The story of Droichead is littered with twists and turns and all sorts of unexplainable changes that if it were a real bridge, it would have collapsed. While its foundation was fairly solid, it had a number of issues, not least the fact that it wasn’t going to be properly resourced, and secondly that it was going to be very difficult to work from a HR and Industrial Relations point of view. However, the Teaching Council found itself with a very powerful ally - the INTO, the primary teachers’ union. In a complete u-turn from its original NEVER NEVER mantra, the INTO leadership convinced almost all of its CEC reps to take on Droichead in their schools. For one of the first times in my memory at least, the INTO leadership stood in direct opposition to the vast majority of its own members. In this part of the episode, I am going to explore the reaction of teachers on the ground to the INTO’s decision and what happened next.

By 2013, The Teaching Council were in a sticky situation. The inspectorate had told them they would no longer be probating teachers but the Union were steadfast that teachers wouldn’t be doing instead. With chants of NEVER NEVER ringing in their heads, the Teaching Council needed to do something. In this part of the episode, I explore what happened next and how they managed to build that bridge and convince the INTO to come over it.

In the last episode of this series on Droichead, I’ve been slowly building the story of how Droichead entered our lives. Last time I began to go through the very first iteration of Droichead, which was called CEPP, the Career Entry Professional Programme, which was launched in January 2012 as a consultation. I went through the in school part of CEPP in the last section but there was an out-of-school side to CEPP too and in this part I’m going to go through that and see if much has changed in the last 10 years.

If you were to ask teachers what was the most divisive initiative to come into the primary education system in the last decade, Droichead would be high on the list. Initially designed so that schools would probate their own new staff, it developed from a pantomime into a circus. In part one, we look at the beginnings of Droichead and how it eventually did exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to achieve.

With all the talk about early childhood education in the media, I was interested in hearing about the sector and the differences between it and primary education. It became apparent very early that we share a huge amount in common in all sorts of areas including the complications of ownership of buildings, of all things! A huge thanks to Celine for taking the time to chat to me. I hope you'll enjoy the interview.

In this summer episode, I go back to my roots in educational technology and offer you five tech tools that helped me in my job this school year. They are:

1. Gmelius - https://gmelius.com/
2. Sunsama - https://sunsama.com/
3. Voice over IP - https://www.3cx.com/ and https://explore.zoom.us/en/products/zoom-phone/
4. Clever.com - https://www.clever.com
5. Screencastify - https://www.screencastify.com/

Oh...and in the spirit of these things, there's a bonus one too: Profile Pic Maker: https://pfpmaker.com/

On 9th July 2021, I was racially abused by people that claimed to be members of the National Party. I received a number of phone calls from the heads of representative bodies, stakeholders and partners. For the first time, I was asked by them, how could they help. And I told them.

In this episode, I discuss some of the people who have gone out of their way to discuss diversity in the education system in the last year, and I also list all of the things that the people who rang me have done since then.

The NCSE was established in 2003 to "improve the delivery of education services to persons with special educational needs arising from disabilities with particular emphasis on children." It's rare to find an organisation that has achieved exactly the opposite of what they set out to do in such a short amount of time. What started off as a way to organise Special Education resources in Ireland has morphed into a bloated, bureaucratic body that answers to no one. In this episode, I explore what went wrong and what I would do if I were the Minister for Education.