Aisling Dolan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the officials presenting from the Department of Education. Our committee is here to help, support and try to drive protection for children and students. That is our ultimate goal. Over the past number of weeks, what we have been hearing has been extremely shocking. I am sure the witnesses have heard a significant amount from many of the committee debates we have been through, with regard to the interviews and witnesses who have come before us.

It is disheartening to think it is one-in-three, globally. Bullying happens. It happens often, but it is about how we tackle it. Our committee is about tackling bullying. Some of my questions have come up through a number of witnesses who have spoken with us over the past number of weeks. I do not know which of our witnesses may be most relevant to respond, but I would like him or her to respond in the spirit of how we will improve the current situation. I would appreciate if he or she would respond in that spirit.

When we had Ombudsman for Children here, there was a question about the youth mental health path finder project. I understand this may be linked with the HSE and the Department of Health as well, but can someone respond on that?

The measurement of bullying, which I know a number of other committee members have mentioned, came up before in terms of it being audited. How we are auditing the action plan on bullying? This was from the anti-bullying centre, ABC, in Dublin City University, DCU, especially from our UNESCO chair on tackling bullying, which is quite an impressive position to have in Ireland and in DCU.

Programmes have come up before. I know the witnesses have mentioned programmes they are rolling out for teachers and teacher training, but it was noted that the FUSE programme was especially impactful. We also heard about the Roots of Empathy early intervention programme in primary schools and how the levels of bullying in primary schools are quite high. How will we support the likes of DCU in rolling out a programme such as FUSE to so many thousands of students? It is incredible. They are doing the best they can, but there is no way they will reach students. We could be waiting for another 25 years and how many students would have gone through the system every five years? What is the Department of Education's engagement with DCU on the FUSE programme and how is it supporting the roll-out of the programme? I may leave it at that with regard to the Roots of Empathy early intervention programme.

One other point was on school inspector reports. When you look up a school on education.ieand you download the report, it speaks about subject matter. Child safeguarding has been mentioned. We have spoken about how a positive school environment around bullying is so important and how some schools may not be as focused on this as others. That is a huge challenge. Should the inspector reports not speak directly about bullying and tackling bullying? If it is not there, why not, considering we know it happens all the time and it is more about the mitigation factors? I went through a couple of reports but they were from 2019 and maybe this has changed since then. There was nothing about tackling bullying. Maybe it was referenced under another term.