Professor Paul Downes:

There are a few points to distinguish here. The whole area of trauma and adverse childhood experiences also pertain to the pre-clinical stage. The focus for the specialist support services in schools, including counsellors, is on the pre-clinical level. The intention is to stop problems early before they mushroom. Those problems include bullying issues where children are internalising self-hate processes. We want to stop the internalisation process early and quickly. Those are all interventions at a pre-clinical level. We can have the staff to get that off the ground quickly in the Minister's initiative. We do not need to train external people with other backgrounds as part of our programme.

At the end of our submission and in the previous submissions from our centre, we have noted the public health model of differentiated need. Dr. O'Reilly has referred to it as the all, the some and the few model. There are different levels of prevention. There is the universal level, select prevention for moderate risk group-based interventions and the indicated prevention which deals with chronic needs and complex needs and involves one-to-one supports. The key gap in the Irish system is at the indicated prevention level and the one-to-one supports. The National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, has been taking many aspects of the approach for which NHS Dorset is advocating. The well-being framework already includes that type of group work and a universal approach. There would be a significant duplication of function and role if we were just to transport the model to the Irish system.

There is a clear distinction to be made in respect of phase 1 of the specialist pilot in primary schools and, as we are advocating, in secondary schools. In phase one, specialist counsellors would be available to provide one-to-one support. The other group-based levels are in the schools already. Phase 2 would then ask the important question, which is, what additional professionals are required. If we want, for example, to move towards a family- and community-based model, as Dr. O'Reilly has adverted to, we need to include family support workers, social care outreach workers in homes and perhaps nurses in that team model.

It is a second layer. We need to be really clear on which professionals we want and why. Let us be clear; multi-speed teams are expensive. Therefore, we need to make sure that each member of the team has a very clear function. They also take time to develop. Our report for the European Commission with Professor Ann Roberts of Oxford noted two other issues, one of which is that something cannot just be transported from one context to another. We have an existing system of services that we need to work with and around. We also need-----