What is your reaction to the findings from this survey?

Well, I'm not surprised at the findings as a serving principal myself doing this work to get the book scheme up and running each year.

It takes an awful lot of time and it takes an awful lot of energy at school level and particularly at a time of the year when we're trying to get kids set up for the school year.

Even the simple task of getting those books out to students can take up quite a lot of time.

But it's not as simple as that.

I mean, if you start at the start of the process and because quite a lot of funding and credit to the Department of Education for providing that funding and I'm sure that there's families listening out there who you know really feel the financial impact of this and they feel that it's a huge benefit to them and we don't disagree with that and we're fully supportive of the idea of giving free school books to children but it's more to do with the expenditure of that money and the work that we have to do around procurement around finance, around management and administration, recording, delivery of books, storage, recycling and so on.

So there are a lot of tasks associated with it that have arrived along with this scheme and really are crowding out our ability to do other important work with students in the school.

Has that been rectified? Are we going anywhere towards near rectifying that?

How so?

Well, first of all, Adrian, I suppose it's important to say that we do believe that the free book scheme has been a good thing for students and has been a good thing for families, um, because all of the students have all of the things that they need, and they're able to start, uh, the school year, uh, with all of them.

Um, in, and that's, I suppose that's the theory of it, and it's working well, um, in, in some instances.

The, the difficulty with, from our point of view, Adrian, is that for us as, as school leaders to manage this system in terms of, first of all, the procurement and sourcing the books that are needed for the students, um, that there's an awful lot of paperwork and an awful lot of technical procurement work, um, involved in that that takes an awful lot of time.

Uh, and then we have the ordering, we have the delivery, and we have the management.

Um, and the idea I spoke about a, a few moments ago about every student starting the school year with everything, you know, deliveries can be, can be difficult to manage.

Um, and, and it, it, I suppose the challenge for us is all of that oversight around ordering, around payment, around managing deliveries, around managing who has the books and so on.

So are schools having, uh, difficulty finding, for example, storage space for, uh, all of the books?

What's the solution?

Well, I suppose from our point of view and in general, David, within the post-primary sector, and this is another task that has landed on the desks of school leaders is And again, it's the accumulation of all of these things that in and of themselves are certainly, you know, they're doable and they're manageable.

But what has happened is that over the years, all of these tasks have accumulated to the stage now where the role of a school leader... has taken them, I suppose, to be more of an administrator than a leader of teaching and learning within the school.

And if you take, for example, and you will have covered it on your show around attendance rates and so on, like I'd be better off talking to students who are having a reluctance to come to school than talking to a supplier about selling books.

So what we're asking from the Minister, and I'll be calling for it tomorrow when I address the conference, is the provision of an administrative officer in every school and that this person would take over some of the non-teaching roles that principals and deputy principals find themselves engaged in and other school leaders within the school, the middle management and so on, so around finance and procurement, governance, buildings and all of those other kind of operational matters that aren't core to teaching and learning.

It does, yeah.

And again, you know, there is an agreement there and There is an agreement with the publisher of four years.

And I mean, in my own school now, we would have had a book rental scheme for years and years.