Ms M?ir?n N? Ch?ileachair:

There has not been any formal engagement with the INTO to date on the pilot programme. That is the short answer to that question. We look forward to it.

I will flesh out an choncheap faoi phobal. When we engage with the special education section and others in the Department of Education and look for services to be co-located in schools we are told that Government policy is to provide services by the community, in the local health service or via GP practices. My experience as a primary school teacher and as a principal is that if we had something co-located in schools children who are at huge risk are more likely to engage. Most children come to school every day. Their parents bring them to school. It is valuable for an at-risk child and an at-risk parent to have somewhere they can come to do both and where the child does not have to be moved out of the building. There are models of good practice from the UK, Iceland and other countries where we have seen this working well. We would like to re-examine the concept of community. For many pupils community is the school. The school is at the centre of the community in many rural areas. Our official definition of community is too narrow in this context. The school should be central to that definition of community.

There are certainly many programmes running in schools that are hugely beneficial. We are at an exciting stage of the development of a new curriculum at primary level and there will be opportunities under the wellbeing specification and a lot of good work will be done, but a therapeutic service cannot be replaced for a child who needs it. Teachers are not psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors or therapists and while they can create, as I was told 40 years ago, an atmosphere of psychological safety in their classroom, they cannot recreate a therapeutic setting. They need support to do that.