A new inspection system for schools will provide "very little hard data" on the quality of teaching or learning in the classroom, a Department of Education's inspector has claimed.
In a confidential memo, the inspector says Whole School Evaluation (WSE), set up to improve the performance of schools, may not give the Department "reliable and objective" information.
The memo by Mr Eamonn O Muircheartaigh has been withheld by the Department for over a year and a half. A request by The Irish Times for the memo and other material on WSE was rejected by the Department during that time.
It said releasing the memo would be "most unhelpful". However, the Information Commissioner, Mr Kevin Murphy, recently ordered the documents to be released.
The evaluation scheme has been piloted in some schools, but full implementation has been blocked for the last year by some of the teacher unions. Parents' groups have described the scheme as too tame, but many teachers are opposed to it.
The inspector's comments are likely to prove embarrassing for the Department, who told Mr Murphy that releasing the material could affect the future introduction of WSE.
Mr O Muircheartaigh is an area inspector and submitted his views in 1999 to a colleague, Mr Gearoid O Conluain, who was involved in the pilot phase of WSE.
Mr O Muircheartaigh said the reason no hard data would be produced under WSE was due to the way information from schools would be collated.
"As the present model for WSE is constructed, it will provide very little hard data that could be used to make inferences about the quality of teaching and learning at system level," he claimed.
Another model could be created to give "reliable and objective statements" about teaching and learning in the classroom "and at the school and the system level".
Mr O Muircheartaigh said it was highly unlikely WSE reports from schools could be kept confidential, as it would be against the spirit, if not the letter, of the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents released by the Department include minutes of meetings about WSE with various education partners. One of these is a meeting between parents' (post-primary) representatives and the Department.
At the meeting the parents, Ms Rose Tully, Mr John Whyte and Mr Sean Grehan, held lengthy discussions about whether WSE could "pick up the phenomenon of large numbers of pupils in some schools taking grinds".
They are recorded as asking: "If the results are good, for this reason, but the quality of teaching is weak, will the fact that parents are paying for grinds emerge?". This issue did not feature subsequently in the WSE meetings.