Ms Anne Tansey:

As the Chairman will be aware, the approach taken by the Department of Education is very much a focus on prevention and early intervention. Our well-being policy statement and framework for practice is very much around that. It is based on best international practice. I am aware the committee has been talking over recent weeks about the important role of schools in supporting well-being. They are supporting and providing children with opportunities to build core social and emotional skills and competencies. They are like coping skills. It is also about providing children and young people with the opportunity to experience strong, supportive relationships in the school setting and to learn through those. It is about providing children and young people with opportunities to be part of a school environment that feels both physically and psychologically safe, an environment to which children and young people feel a sense of belonging, where they feel connected, where they feel their voice is heard, and where they feel supported. While those statements are brief, they are very deep and there is a lot contained within them.

In the approach it takes, the Department of Education encourages schools to use the school self-evaluation process, which is an embedded process within schools. We encourage them to use that process to focus on well-being. We have developed a range of resources to support schools in so doing. We have statements of effective practice. People may ask what a good school looks like. We have a range of statements around what a good school looks like with regard to those three areas. We encourage schools to use questionnaires, focus groups and resources we have developed to reflect on their own needs, to see what they are doing well or where they need to improve, and to put in place a school improvement plan to support that. We know that, internationally, this approach is found to produce a wide range of educational and social benefits for individual children and young people with increased inclusion, social capital and social cohesion. It has benefits for mental health. We strongly take that approach. We recognise, however, that within this there is a continuum of need within schools and that while all of our universal supports will support a lot of our children and young people, there is a need for greater support for some children who need more targeted support.

On the query around school refusal behaviour, in our service we have noticed there has been quite a bit of school refusal behaviour since the schools have reopened. It was not so much the first time the schools reopened but after the second closure and subsequent reopening. NEPS provides a casework service as well as a support and development service for teachers. As part of our casework service we support individual children. Through our consultation service we have been supporting children, their teachers and their parents to support the successful return to school of the many children who have been experiencing school refusal behaviour. We are there with the school on the ground. Covid has allowed us to extend our practice to be a blended model. We use online supports and we consult online with schools, which makes our response probably more immediate. These are the things we have learned from the Covid-19 experience. We have been supporting teachers, parents and young people around school refusal behaviour since March, among other things. It has been part of our casework service.

The other approaches we use are very specific evidence-based approaches and projects. We use the Friends programme, which is an anxiety prevention and resilience-building programme based on the principles of cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT. It is a train the trainer programme. We train teachers to deliver the programme within schools, where schools teach children to apply the principles of CBT to allow them to cope and problem solve, and ultimately to reduce anxiety and build resilience. We use the Incredible Years teacher classroom management programme, which targets primary schools and the building of social and emotional competence. It also looks at building resilience.

Specifically within that programme there is a section on bullying and what is called bully-proofing the school, whereby there is an atmosphere of problem-solving in the school and people work together in a non-threatening, non-blaming way. The whole school community works together, including parents, who are a key part of that. Those are two examples of the programmes we use to support the development of social and emotional learning in schools.