Professor Paul Downes:

As I proposed earlier, we would ideally look to move towards that over time. The national pilot would propose one counsellor between two locally adjacent schools to minimise travelling. Counsellors would be embedded as staff in those schools for both structured appointments and flexible crisis management for a child who presents on the day with particular issues that may arise in class. The intention is that it would be school-based. That is what we also need in the secondary schools. We do not have this in the school system for trauma and adverse tragedies.

The point we made in our submission was that this is routine in many international contexts and has been for years. Our report for the European Commission on early school leaving also highlighted that this has been embedded as a feature of the systems in many European countries for a long time. We have always had that system gap in Irish schools.