Dr. Paul Downes:

There is a need to distinguish between the levels of prevention need - between the moderate risk group and the indicated prevention level of chronic need, trauma and adverse childhood experiences. At the latter level, guidance counsellors are not qualified therapists. I would not agree their role is for one-to-one intensive sustained support for trauma and adverse childhood experiences. Some of them have stated publicly that they see their role as referring on to the specialist services at that level. We need to distinguish between the two levels - the guidance counsellors who lead whole-school bullying initiatives at the universal level of a school, and those who provide specialist, intensive one-to-one support. I am not in favour of the provision of this kind of one-to-one support by those who are not qualified therapists. I do not think anyone would suggest giving university lecturers extra continuing professional development and put them in to be counsellors for university students when there are specialist counsellors available who work at that level.

On the whole-school level, a feature of international bullying prevention approaches is that they do not put guidance counsellors in a central role. Guidance counsellors do not have a central role in many of the prevention and intervention programmes. I would argue that the Deputy is proposing a half-baked Irish solution to an Irish problem. I am not saying that an individual guidance counsellor could not lead and be the champion for a whole-school co-ordinating committee - there may be some who would be very good in that role, and there may be others who would not - but a lot depends on how we conceive of the composition of a driving committee at whole-school level. The different levels of intervention need to be distinguished.