Ms Mary Logue:

I am confident all of us around the table want schools and third level institutions to be places where mental health is seen as central to the well-being of all students, teachers, lecturers and other staff, and indeed parents and other stakeholders. Right now, however, I regret to say, it is the view of the ICP that this is not the case. In schools and educational settings, high levels of anxiety are being experienced by students, their parents, teachers and school principals, school boards and third level leaders. The ICP represents over 1,700 psychotherapists across several modalities and is the national awarding organisation for the European certificate of psychotherapy. It is our view that it is essential that affordable and accessible psychotherapy services be available to all who need them and that these services are delivered by appropriately trained and qualified professionals.

At an everyday level, we all know that to have a healthy society we need to raise children and young people who can learn and play in safety. In their best iteration, schools and third level institutions can act as islands of safety in a chaotic world. In a school setting, many teachers learn from experience that it is impossible to teach if the classroom is filled with children who are unable to participate due to high levels of anxiety. Earlier this year, my colleague, Trish Murphy, director of the student counselling service in Trinity College Dublin, TCD, spoke here of the increase in demand from students in that institution. Student counselling services all over the country are having similar experiences.

ICP members working in and with schools have relayed shared experiences since the pandemic where there is a push to return to normal. This normal involves the pressure to return to teaching in the vital but narrow curriculum, rather than providing safe spaces where children and young people can learn. Speaking with a colleague who works with a Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools, DEIS, band 1 school in the west, I was told there were over 90 unexplained absences in a school of 500 pupils on one day last week. I think the committee members will all agree this tells us something regarding the mental health of our young people. Our teachers are not supported and trained to handle the level of trauma children are experiencing, trauma that has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

I would like to share with the committee an initiative that is working. The Joint Managerial Body, JMB, which provides assistance to voluntary secondary schools and training to school management, runs Balint groups, where a qualified psychotherapist jointly leads the group with a school principal. The task of the Balint group, made up of eight to 12 principals and meeting every six weeks, is to provide a confidential peer-based setting to reflect on the emotional experience of the work.

The workload and worry-load of school principals has increased significantly in the past decade. While they are often reminded "that principals need to create an environment of emotional support for staff, the emotional support is often missing for themselves". In one such group last week, where a principal spoke of a very complex case involving students, a family and teachers, the principal said, "This group is the only place I have to bring problems such as this."

I give these examples to illustrate that there are already mental health supports in schools being provided by psychotherapists working in the educational system. What is needed is more of them. When systems come under pressure - for example, when it comes to managing disturbing or disruptive behaviour in schools - a trauma-informed approach will help teachers understand that these behaviours start out as frustrated attempts to communicate distress. In the absence of this understanding, the misbehaving child is met with a return to traditional methods of managing disruptive behaviour such as detention and suspension. In those situations the school becomes yet another traumatic trigger.

By increasing resources, the support structures that are already in place in some schools can be replicated and improved. In addition to the bolstering of support structures within the school system, ICP also suggests that the resourcing of CAMHS teams with psychotherapists as well as specialist child and adolescent psychotherapists be prioritised. As another of our members remarked, "Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists are like Hen’s teeth in CAMHS." ICP supports as a priority the reinforcing and support of the work already taking place such as that in the education and training boards and the work being done by the JMB Balint groups as well as the increase in the number of specialist psychotherapists within CAMHS teams nationally. Our profession is ready to step up and to play its part. We look forward to working with all members of the committee in any way we can.