TEACHERS have supported a motion of no confidence in the north's chief inspector of schools.
Members of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) endorsed the motion at the union's annual conference in Liverpool.
While ATL is one of the largest teaching unions in Britain, it is one of the smallest in the north.
Northern Ireland executive member Mark Montgomery said the resolution was not designed to be a personal criticism of chief inspector Noelle Buick.
Instead, he said, it was a criticism of the office and organisation of the Education and Training Inspectorate (ETI).
?Inspection was strongly perceived at school level as a "high stakes" event, Mr Montgomery said.
He added that the ETI held schools and individuals accountable, while refusing to acknowledge it should be held accountable in the event of an appeal against its findings.
"The high stakes nature of inspections, in turn, drives an expectation that schools waste valuable learning time by engaging in a range of micro-managed weighing and measuring processes such as pupil pursuit, tracking, obsessive micro-level lesson planning, excessive interim reporting, testing, assessment and examination analysis," he said.
"In short, teachers and principals feel obliged to engage in excessive bureaucratic back covering which both lowers levels of trust, discretion and professionalism in schools and encourages an always on guard mentality."
Appeals against inspection judgments, he added, were conducted `in-house' in the north, and the chief inspector had the final say.
"This is a situation, which is not appropriate. Having an in-house appeals procedure is not healthy for the teaching profession," he said.
In a letter to the union, Ms Buick said there had been considerable engagement between the ETI and the ATL. The ETI complaints procedure, she said, could be used to make a formal complaint about any aspect of its work.
