Dr. Joseph Duffy:

In terms of talking about a lifelong approach, in Jigsaw the aim is to help people have a healthy transition into adulthood. That transition might be through finishing full-time education after secondary school and then doing an apprenticeship, attending third level or a lot of other different things. If we think about what we want as a country for our young people, we want a healthy transition. We want young people to be resilient and robust and to be able to contribute very positively to all areas of life.

That involved thinking about third level institutions not just in terms of education. The original idea of a university was education of the whole person. We need to pull back the lens from that and think about how we do that much earlier. We have done that very well in terms of thinking about access programmes and how to support people, in particular in terms of the traditional view of education. How do we support someone much more psychologically in coming into third level and starting that much earlier?

Going back to what we said at the beginning, this involves thinking about particular targeted cohort of groups, intersectionality and who is under-represented and how we will support them in terms of being represented. On the argument made earlier about a certain homogeneity, how do we support other entries into the sector? We need to talk within secondary level about developing a career as a psychotherapist or psychologist and so on. How do we encourage people to do that rather than seeing it as a middle-class phenomenon only open to certain groups of people? There is a lot to be done and a lot to be thought about.