Ms Patricia O'Sullivan:

In our colleges we have dedicated student support officers and counsellors. We have noticed a huge increase since before Covid. One of our colleges had a 157% increase in the demand for counselling services from their institution.

Engagement with students is very important in order to see what they need and want. We regularly do surveys to find that out and we do a lot of mental health promotion. We are not included in the initial Togetherall pilot but we have touched base with Ms. Fox and are discussing it to see how we can be part of these initiatives in future. At the moment, we seem to be excluded from a lot of the really brilliant national campaigns. We want to put our hand up and say we would like to be involved in those.