As the secondary school year draws to a close, the sixth-year graduation is centre stage for many, including for school principals. There is something very special every year for principals in watching students cross the threshold from adolescence into young adulthood, having witnessed their growth not only in knowledge but in character, confidence and purpose over the years.
To be a secondary school principal in Ireland today is both a great honour and a formidable responsibility. It is a vocation as much as it is a profession. Principals are called to be pedagogical leaders and visionaries, administrators and crisis managers, policy implementers and student advocates.
At the heart of the principal’s role lies the responsibility of leading teaching and learning. This is not an abstract or titular role. Rather, it is a strategic responsibility focused on improving the quality of education and shaping the educational culture of the school where meaningful learning can take place and students can engage with new ideas, challenge themselves and develop as thinkers, collaborators and creators.
Principals must lead by example, model reflective practice and ensure that student learning remains the core currency of the school community. Their task is to foster an inclusive learning environment where every student can flourish. They must lead a school culture where teachers are empowered and feel supported and where the continuous professional learning of staff is valued as central to student achievement. The principal is called to serve as a guardian of possibility.
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But none of this can be meaningfully addressed when basic structural needs in leadership support go unmet. Principals operate every day in a chasm between the political rhetoric of student-centred education and the reality of an underfunded, understaffed and overburdened system.
In recent years, the role of the principal has become overwhelmingly unsustainable. The exponential growth in policy demands, compliance requirements, procedural documentation and scrutiny from external inspections has displaced educational leadership from the core of school leadership.
Instead of being able to focus on teaching and learning, principals are increasingly consumed by health and safety audits, GDPR compliance, legislative updates and policy implementation from circulars that arrive weekly, often with little or no notice.
The reality is that principals are now expected to be chief executives, chief financial officers, HR directors, compliance officers and facilities managers, all while leading learning, managing behaviour, supporting parents and safeguarding children.
To add to it all, the school inspectorate, while important in maintaining standards, unnecessarily amplifies the administrative pressure because they do not see that the lived reality of school leadership cannot be captured in checklists.
In recent years, successive ministers for education have been tone deaf on the issue of support for school leadership, giving no provision to reduce administrative workloads (quite the opposite), no new funding for additional deputy principals and no specific measures to address the growing strain on school leaders who are struggling to manage under-resourced systems, which is severely taking its toll.
In the recent Irish Post-Primary School Leaders’ Health and Wellbeing three-year longitudinal Deakin University study, nearly 45 per cent of post primary school leaders reported experiencing high to severe levels of burnout, while stress levels were higher than those of the general workforce.
The study gave an alarming insight into the pressures faced by principals and deputy principals. Disturbingly, the report illustrated the scale of workplace violence in schools, including bullying and threats facing principals and deputies. Female school leaders are particularly affected, with reported cases of physical and cyberbullying showing marked increases over the past three years.
Compounding this is the sharp decline in applications for school principal positions. Increasingly, capable and committed teachers are choosing not to pursue leadership roles because the personal, emotional and professional costs are too high. The role of principal is no longer seen as attractive or sustainable, and this poses a threat to the quality and continuity of school leadership in the country.
Despite all of this, principals are being asked to lead the new senior cycle reform which is both philosophically and practically contentious. Many principals support the intention to move towards broader, more authentic assessment. However, the lack of clear guidance, adequate resourcing and systemic readiness, alongside unresolved concerns about equity and reliability and the place of AI, make this a deeply problematic reform to lead at school level. Once again, the burden of implementation falls on school leaders who are already stretched beyond capacity.
‘Principals are not martyrs. They are professionals. Their resilience should be honoured but not assumed. Their vocation should be supported but not taken for granted’
Leadership in schools does not and cannot rest on the shoulders of one individual. The role of the deputy principal is crucial. However, the current allocation model for deputy principals is both outdated and unfit for purpose. It ignores the reality on the ground, which is that schools are larger, more diverse, more accountable and significantly more complex than when the original staffing thresholds were conceived. The rigid threshold model based on enrolment figures grossly oversimplifies school leadership needs.
In their pre-Budget submission 2025, the Joint Managerial Body (JMB) set out an unarguable case for the enhancement of leadership capacity at deputy principal level. Their position was widely supported by other relevant stakeholders and by the other post-primary management bodies. Enhanced deputy principal provision is also at the forefront of the JMB 2026 pre-budget submission.
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It is important to note that this is not just a resource issue. It is a moral one. A government that publicly champions wellbeing and educational excellence cannot continue to ignore the human cost of neglecting its school leaders.
Principals are not martyrs. They are professionals. Their resilience should be honoured but not assumed. Their vocation should be supported but not taken for granted.
We need systemic reform that acknowledges the complexity of the work of school principals and provides the necessary structures to support it. We need the kind of policymaking that listens to and learns from those who know the realities on the ground.
If the Government is serious about sustaining high-quality education in our schools, then it must act now through the Department of Education to support school leadership by: revising the deputy principal allocation mode; providing additional administrative support; investing in building sustainable leadership teams, and recognising that quality leadership is not a luxury but is a prerequisite for school success.
Anything less is a failure of leadership at the highest level.
John McHugh is principal of Ardscoil Rís in Dublin 9
