As the State's second-level principals and deputy principals meet this week, they will be looking to the Minister for Education for a solution to their current administrative overload.

At last year's conference of the National Association of Principal and Deputy Principals (NAPD) the freshly-minted Minister for Education, Mary Hanafin, made the following commitment to frazzled school leaders. "It is not our intention that you should be administrators. I am going to work with you over the next year to ensure that we can reduce the burden, to review ways in which we can reduce the bureaucracy, while meeting our obligations, just to make sure that you can get on with the job that you were employed to do."

The paper chase is out of hand, says NAPD director Mary McGlynn. Instead of being an educational leader, today's principal is a legal secretary, a backroom accountant, a data processor, a social worker, a HR manager, a contract lawyer and a host of other operatives that he or she never trained to be.

"Everything changed for principals and deputies in 1998," says McGlynn. "Up until that point, the legal framework for school management hung on ministerial memos and circulars. With the introduction of the Education Act of 1998, however, the education system suddenly had a statutory basis with wide-ranging implications for schools, touching every corner of school life from the detention room to the roll call."

The Act set in train a rapid succession of legislative changes that transformed the everyday management of schools. Suddenly, principals and deputy principals were tangled up in employment law, financial consultancy, health and safety regulations, industrial relations, assiduous attendance monitoring and the drafting of new and individual school policies for every area from admissions to bullying.

"We are great at creating legislation in this country, but we rarely review the impact of that legislation on the institutions that have to implement it," says McGlynn. "This is especially pertinent to schools, which are like small communities."

NAPD president Michael Parsons, who is also principal of Portlaoise Vocational School, describes the fallout. "Imagine the amount of principals' time that is currently engaged in drafting school policies from scratch in every one of the 743 post-primary schools around the State? Policy documents are required for discipline, admissions, parents' councils, student councils and a range of other areas. Each has to be drawn up in consultation with boards of management, parents and students.

"Considerable legal expertise is required in many cases. If only the department could have supplied us with policy templates - think of all the work that could be saved?"

Of course, many other legislative changes have impinged on the role of the principal as educational leader. The Education Welfare Act of 2000, the Ombudsman for Children Act 2002, the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs 2004, the Equal Status Act 2000 and the Equality Act 2004, among many others. The principal is now personally responsible for new legislation in a variety of fields that have no direct bearing on education.

Other tectonic shifts on Planet Education continue to change the ground under the principal's feet. In the last 30 years, four major syllabus reviews saw the introduction of the Leaving Cert Vocational Programme, the Leaving Cert Applied, transition year and the Junior Cert.

"Between 1998 and 2004, the principal became the most legislated-for individual in Irish society," says McGlynn. "Section 22 of the Education Act makes it quite clear that responsibility for every aspect of school management lies at the foot of the principal."

"Every aspect of school management" constitutes a formidable "To-Do" list [ see panel].

"Let me be quite clear on one point," says McGlynn. "As principals and deputy principals we are not complaining about having too much work to do. The role of school leader is a privileged and responsible one. The problem for us is that we are not permitted to fulfil the responsibilities of the role when we are constantly on a paper chase."

The perceived role of the principal is intimately connected with society's expectation of the school. This, too, is changing rapidly as the chattering classes place more and more problems at the school gate. Schools are regularly blamed for everything from littering to obesity to teenage pregnancy. In loco parentis they may be, but how much parenting can we really expect our schools to do?

"Some issues continually make the headlines - exam results, suicide, binge drinking, eating disorders, obesity - and each is attacked in isolation. 'Why aren't the schools doing more to raise awareness of this or that issue?' We never grapple with the deeper questions. Our values as a society are what feed into all these problems. How can the school be expected to prevent unhealthy eating or binge drinking in children when much of the adult population behave in a similar fashion? How can we shift the focus away from the points race and back to education when wider society seems to say that profit is all that matters?"

One of the greatest difficulties for principals and deputy principals is dealing with the growing notion of education as a commodity. Massive student support for the website ratemyteachers.ie suggests that many students view teachers in the same way as they view restaurants or film actors - as service providers who had better deliver the goods to their consumers or put up with public critique. Parents, in their own way, reflect the same attitude as they clamour for league tables and the publication of Whole School Evaluation reports.

"So far, the experience of Whole School Evaluation has been a positive one for us," says Parsons. "Our colleagues say that the process seems fair and even-handed. We are, however, very concerned about the Department's intentions to publish the results. The WSE programme was established on the understanding that results would not be published. The other issue that concerns us is the expertise of the evaluation team. The role of the principal is so diverse, how can it be evaluated by anyone other than an individual with experience of running a school?"

In the current shrinking student marketplace, no school wants a bad review. Parsons admits that once his tenure as president of the NAPD comes to an end, his next challenge will be launching a recruitment drive for his own school. Many principals are in the same position as falling student numbers put schools in direct competition for each other for survival (see story on opposite page).

Competition, results, commodities, consumers - all this is the language of business. Is the typical principal set to look more like the typical CEO? Are we witnessing the dawn of the Ray Kearns style of school leadership? Unless the Minister, Mary Hanafin, removes some of the bureaucratic obstacles, principals will not have time to be educational leaders, McGlynn contends.

This has implications not just for the management of schools, but for gender balance in the role. Despite the fact that there are more women teachers than men by a ratio of 2:1 in the post-primary sector and 4:1 at primary level, the number of women in school management continues to lag behind the number of men.

"Perhaps if the role was re-examined and made more manageable, more women would be in a position to take that step. As it is, many women simply cannot reconcile their wider responsibilities with the work level of the principal, which is unreal at times."

On Thursday, Hanafin is set to give conference delegates feedback on the progress of the review on the administrative workload of principals and deputy principals. Everyone is hoping it won't be just a load of paperwork.