The average number of applicants for a position as primary school principal has dropped from 5.5 per post in 1996 to 2 per post this year. At imes, an advertisement inviting applicants for the job receives no replies at all.

Researchers Dr Gerry McNamara and Dr Joe O'Hara predict that not only will this trend continue but the number of well qualified staff willing to take on the job of principal will dwindle even further.

Both serving principals and reluctant leaders see principalship as a legal and bureaucratic quagmire, the DCU researchers stated in a paper prepared for the Educational Studies Association of Ireland (ESAI).

"The legislative avalanche of recent decades around issues of equity and equality, the re-emergence of school inspection and an increasingly litigious society have combined to place an immense strain on school leaders," their paper states.

"You must have every policy and procedure, entry policy, equality policy, discipline policy, suspension/expulsion policy, etc, etc, etc, a perfect paper trail on every issue - make one slip and you are on your own," one principal said.

Even the prospect of additional income in these straitened times is failing to reel the applicants in. The allowance paid to a principal is dependent on school size: the head of a school with five or fewer teachers gets an additional €9,310 a year and this varies upwards, with the head of a school with 20 to 23 teachers getting €21,386. 

One of the reasons why suitably qualified candidates are slow to bite is because there is no method of exit once they take on the job. A significant number of principals told Drs McNamara and O'Hara that they were sorry they had ever taken on the job and they wished there was a viable exit route available. Several described the role of principal as a "life sentence".

Moreover, both serving principals and reluctant leaders regarded the preparation for the role as highly inadequate, with most new principals getting no preparatory training at all.

"One day you are a teacher or a deputy principal, the next you are behind this desk responsible for everything from the first minute," one principal said.

Drs McNamara and O'Hara recommend better succession planning, on-the-job training, and an apprenticeship/induction system.

In a separate paper for the ESAI, Dublin teachers Claire Ni Chianain and Patricia Cahill-Rinn said that feelings of professional isolation and loneliness, as well as dealing with ineffective staff, were the biggest challenges facing principals. (Source: Irish Independent)