According to the INTO website and Voice for Teachers Facebook page, the DES announced today that in response to the INTO’s demand for additional resources to be provided to support the implementation of POD a once off per capita payment of €1.50 per pupil will be paid to all schools before Christmas. There will be a minimum payment of €90 per school. The funding is intended to assist with the provision of clerical support related to the data collection phase of the project.
While this is welcome news for someone who’ll be doing the donkey work, it still doesn’t solve the longer term problem of data entry especially the incapability for POD to sync properly with existing MIS services such as Aladdin, Databiz and the others. I presume the INTO’s stance will now be to support POD but I would urge for them to tackle the above issue before advising schools to participate. As I have stated many times, I would like POD to be introduced to schools but it has to work properly and it has to work with existing applications. There is no point in entering the same data up to 3 times into different systems.
