Speaking to the annual conference of the Irish Primary Schools Principals Association in Galway on 8th February 2003, I said:

Let me begin by reading to you the request I got from the organisers today, as to what I should speak to you about. It reads:

"You are the Secretary of the Department of Education and are finding it difficult to find suitable (or any) candidates to apply for the position of principal (branch manager) for a number of schools (shops) of which you have 3,000. What steps would you as chief executive, or Secretary of the Department, take to overcome this problem?"

The first point I want to make is that the comparison, between the role of a school principal and the manager of one of our shops, is not such a bad one at all. Let us explore the comparison, and see what insights we can draw from it.

First, however, let me pin my colours to the mast in regard to the importance of education and the place that teachers should occupy in the education system. I am not an educational expert, and the nearest I have come to being directly involved was during the five years I spent chairing the steering committee on the Leaving Cert Applied. That experience gave me a front-row seat at some of the struggles that are at the heart of our education system. I learned a lot from those five years, and they inform a lot of what I am going to say here today.

I am one of those who believe that the absolute bedrock of a society is its education system. I believe that the quality of that system sets the boundaries of what a society can do, and of what its people both individually and collectively can achieve. It has become commonplace in recent years to claim that the economic success of the Celtic Tiger owed a lot to the foundation created by our education system, and I would go along with that.

I also believe that quality in education is something it is very easy to take for granted. It is very easy to believe that because a system has up to now delivered a satisfactory outcome, that it will always go on doing so - no matter how one under-resources or undermines that system. It is also very easy to use the record of past success to draw a veil over quite serious short-comings in the system we have.

No-one who is aware of the level of literacy and numeracy problems thrown up in our system, or of the number of young people who drop out of the system before completing the secondary cycle, or of our consistent failure down the years in using education to redress the stigma of disadvantage - no-one who is aware of any of that would ever be tempted to claim that our system is perfect. But it certainly has produced some worthwhile results, and we should be alert to any threat that looks like undermining that success.

Who is responsible for the measure of success that our education system has had?

On this question again, I personally am in no doubt at all. The quality of our education depends first, last and always on the quality of the teaching it provides. Which is another way of saying that teachers are at the heart of it. Your education system cannot be better than the teachers who staff it. Good teachers are the very heart of an effective education system.

It follows, then, that if the community should feel a sense of debt to its education system for the economic progress we have made, it should feel an equal sense of debt to the people who sustain the system, and make it work - the teachers on the ground.

There are many who would argue that the community no longer feels that sense of debt, that over the past few decades the status of teachers in our society has declined. To whatever extent that this is true, I think it is unfortunate. More, I would consider it to be highly important from a national point of view to reverse that trend, and to rebuild the status of teachers and the respect that they are paid by other members of society.

So now that you know where I am coming from, let us return to this comparison between a school principal and a supermarket manager. What are the similarities, and what are the differences?

Let me say that in my own company we believe in giving the local manager the maximum possible autonomy in how he runs his shop. We do not have a "head office" that calls the shots; instead, we have a "support office" whose declared function is to give the people working at the coal-face whatever support they need to do their job properly.

This is not to say, of course, that the local manager has the freedom to do absolutely anything he likes. We are a single company, with a particular way of doing things, and it is very desirable that the shopping experience is broadly comparable from shop to shop. On top of this, there are laws that have to be observed - in regard to health and safety, in regard to employment, and so on. And at the end of the day, each of our shops must turn in a profit.

There are a lot of rules that we expect a manager to keep, but at the same time we realise that at the heart of the job we want him to do is a large area where rules do not apply - but individual initiative and enthusiasm certainly do. We realise that there is no way we can impose that initiative and enthusiasm by fiat, or by means of a rulebook. They will only come, and can only come, from within the person themselves.

Now in doing his job, one of our manager is driven by two factors - two groups of people who determine his success. The first and more important group is the customers, the other group is his colleagues who work alongside him. Everything the manager does is affected by one or other of those groups. Dealing with them is, really, what the job of one of our managers is all about.

The two groups are not equally important. By far the more important in determining the manager's success is the customers. If you are a supermarket manager, you cannot but be aware that it is on the customer that your job depends. In a very real sense, it is the customer who signs the manager's salary cheque at the end of the month.

So the manager very quickly comes to frame his job in a particular way: his objective must always be to get the customers to come back again and again, and the means he has open to him to achieve that is by meeting their needs.

In a very real sense again, the manager is on the customer's side: his priority is to see that the customer always gets what he or she wants. His task, looked at in one way, is to bring together all the resources at his disposal to reach the over-riding objective of meeting the customers' needs. He is the customer's ally, he is the customer's servant. And his success as a manager will depend very much on the extent to which his customers see him as their ally, as their servant, as being on their side.

Let me dwell for a moment on this issue of customers' needs. It is not the manager's job to give to the customer what he thinks they want. Instead, it is his job to give them what they want. And the first part of doing that is finding out what they want.

This is why our managers are first and foremost listeners. They know that the first stage in meeting a customer's needs is knowing what those needs are. And there is no book that will tell them that. There is no substitute for getting to know your customers, direct and on a face-to-face basis.

What do they do with the knowledge they acquire by listening? First of all, it affects they way they run their shop - in a hundred different ways, from the trivial to the quite important. But equally, what they learn from customers is information that they pass up the line - so that the support office can serve them better, and so that top management will be better informed about the real issues that affect customers on a day-to-day basis.

Customers are one group, the manager's colleagues are another. What are his tasks in this area? To put it concisely, his main job in regard to his colleagues is to get his team focused on the task of meeting the customers' needs in the same way as he does himself. This means two things mainly - first is giving direction and second is ensuring quality.

Leadership is not really about telling people to do things. Instead, it is much more a question of pointing people in a particular direction, and encouraging them and enthusing them to go in that direction as energetically as they can. A manager's role is to be seen as the articulator of a philosophy - the disseminator of a vision that he motivates everyone on his team to buy into.

Equally, though, it means ensuring that quality standards are set and are maintained. It is up to the manager to set expectations for his people: he must let them know clearly what is expected of them, he must monitor their performance to make sure that they deliver, and he must be ready to take remedial action when people fail to deliver. Ultimately, this comes down to the power to fire people, but the successful manager very rarely has to resort to that.

In our system, I hope it is now clear, the local manager is not a cog in a wheel. Instead he is a fulcrum on which the whole system depends. Everything revolves around him.

Now let's move the focus to education.

Which is the school principal, a cog in a machine or a fulcrum on which the system depends?

I am not going to answer that; indeed, I am not the person to answer that. But it is a question that I suggest to you bears thinking about.

If your conclusion veers toward the cog answer rather than to the fulcrum answer, could I suggest that part of the reason may be an absence of a customer-driven focus among school principals?

In fact, in looking at that issue there is a prior question to address: who is the customer in the education system?

Could I suggest that for many of the people working in the system, their mistake is to regard the Department of Education as the customer?

I see that as a mistake, because to my mind the Department of Education in this equation should perform the function that the support office performs in my company - no more and no less. The Department of Education may consider that it is the dominant factor in the education mix, but it is that view that has created an organisation that in my view is seriously dysfunctional.

The customers of an education system are those that benefit from the output of the system - namely, the students. The only thing that makes an education system different from any other normal market transaction is that, because the direct customers are so young, their needs and wishes are usually expressed for them by their parents.

How many people in education truly regard the parents of their students as their customers? And how many people in education take their needs seriously, and focus their whole activity around them?

I think the answer is very few. And in that answer, I suggest, lies the root of the problem I mentioned earlier - the fall in the status of the teacher in our community. I suggest, too, that the way to rebuild that status is through the customer.

Too few of the general public regard the teacher, or the school principal, as their ally, or their friend, as a person who is on their side in their seeking to meet their needs.

Why is this so? I think there are a number of reasons.

One is probably a hangover from the days when the teacher was looked up to as the repository of knowledge that others did not have. In that situation, perhaps a tradition of aloofness was allowed to grow up - a sense of distance between teachers and the rest of the population. Maybe this was the reason why it became common for some teachers to treat parents in the same way as they treated their pupils - on a different level of knowledge. I don't know to what extent this is the case, but it should be clear that it is no longer any basis on which to build a relationship between teachers and parents.

Another, and perhaps more fundamental reason, is that down the years teachers have learned to look after their own interests, rather than to look after the interests of the education system as a whole.

This came to a head in the "resource wars" of the mid-1980s, when in the face of Government determination to cut resources, the teachers' unions fought successfully to preserve their own position in an age of slash and burn. The result was that while the teachers' standard of living was largely preserved, at least for the moment, the impact of the Government cuts fell entirely on the non-pay elements of spending.

The fruit of that period was an infrastructure that rapidly deteriorated, to a point where a very large number of schools simply became unsuitable as places to teach in - but they still went on doing so. What I find utterly incredible that in the year 2003, having passed through a decade of unparalleled prosperity, the situation is no better. And now we have descended again into an era of belt-tightening, in which building projects get put on a finger that gets longer and longer.

The result is that many teachers today despair of the environment in which they have to teach - either the basic physical environment, with leaky roofs or rat-infested schools, or a general under-resourcing in relation to educational needs, as in the availability of remedial teachers or psychological counseling, to say nothing of the basic pupil-teacher ratio.

A second consequence of the teachers pursuing their own interests exclusively has resulted in a situation where the application of quality standards, and the policing of quality controls, has been left almost totally in the hands of the individual teacher. To the extent that this is so, it deprives management of exercising one of the key functions of management that I mentioned earlier - which is the setting and monitoring of quality standards.

My point about all this is that teachers, and particularly school principals, cannot wash their hands of responsibility for it. Down the years you exerted your powers to look after yourselves. But you did not consider it part of your remit to exert the same kind of pressure in defending the wider system. And the state the system is in today bears eloquent witness to that failure.

Let me come back again to the issue of being on the customer's side, of being perceived as their friend and ally. The teacher, potentially, is the rallying-point for customer dissatisfaction about conditions that the parent is not happy about. But how often does the teacher exercise that leadership?

Too many parents consider teachers to be part of the problem. Let us leave aside the issue of whether that perception is justified. The fact is that it is a perception you cannot afford to leave unchanged, even if your horizon stretches no further than what is strictly the self-interest of teachers.

Teachers I have talked to speak again and again of how impotent they feel, crushed under the weight of a system that is penny-pinching, uncaring and above all massively resistant to change. Because teachers are paid by the Department, they tend to feel they must be beholden to that Department.

Let me just say: if you see yourselves as merely a cog in the machine, why be surprised if people treat you as such? If, on the other hand, you begin to see yourselves as the fulcrum of the education system, then other possibilities open up.

I suggest that the first step must be in reaching out to your customers, the parents of your pupils.

Become the articulators of their discontents, become the leader of their aspirations. With them on your side, you will find your power immeasurably increased.