About Us

The National Principals’ Forum (NPF) is a grassroots lobby group of Primary School Principal Teachers, established in May 2018. They are seeking to work with the Minister for Education, Management Bodies and Representative Bodies to affect urgent changes needed to sustain them in their roles as school leaders and help us to provide the inclusive and progressive educational provision and experiences our pupils  deserve. We wish to protect the integrity of our profession, which is being relentlessly eroded.

At a minimum, the group are asking all stakeholders to support the following needs:

• One release day per week at least for ALL teaching Principals and a review of the allocation criteria for release days that shows cognisance of all staff in the school, SEN profile and individual school needs.
• A fair and sustainable workload within the working time limit of 48 hours per week.
• Payment of the outstanding Principals’ Award agreed upon in 2007.
• A review of the role of the Principal teacher which has not been defined or quantified in any meaningful way since 1973.

Unless these needs are addressed, we will continue to unite and lobby for these necessary changes, as our system continues to lose more and more of its finest educational leaders to ill health, stress and burnout.

While we encourage all principals to support these efforts. We must stand together – “Enough is truly enough,” and perhaps we will see some meaningful progress finally made.

All resources, template letters, campaign flyers etc are available on our home page or under the ‘Resources’ Section of our website.