Ms ?ine Lynch:

I thank the committee for the invitation to appear today to discuss the topic of mental health supports in schools and tertiary education and, indeed, for its interest and dedication to this urgent issue. The NPC’s vision statement aspires to an Ireland where every child has the opportunity to reach his or her full potential. While the NPC’s core focus is education, it is clear that children’s mental health has a significant impact on realising this vision.

Since 2015, the NPC has been providing supports to parents to support their children’s mental health. It is through this engagement that we hear regularly, directly from parents, about the challenges they face in this area. Since 2015, the demand for our supports has risen, with just over 1,700 parents attending our sessions in 2015 and more than 3,000 now attending each year. In addition, during the pandemic we ran a four-week webinar, again supporting parents to support their children’s mental health, with in excess of 7,500 parents attending. Time and time again parents express concern about their children’s mental health, ranging from anxiety and social difficulties to more serious concerns. Each time they tell us that they cannot access any support despite numerous attempts to do so, even privately, or their child is on a long waiting list.

Ireland committed to promoting all children’s rights, including the right to health, when it ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNCRC, in 1992. Ireland was last examined by the committee in 2016. At that time, the committee expressed several concerns relating to mental healthcare, including the long waiting times for treatment, the lack of access to out-of-hours support and children being admitted to adult psychiatric wards owing to inadequate availability of mental healthcare facilities for children. The committee recommended that Ireland improve the capacity and quality of its mental healthcare services for children and adolescents. In an evaluation for the EU Commission of the 2011 Council Recommendation on Early School Leaving, Donlevy et al. found that emotional counselling supports in and around schools are widespread in many EU countries. This research suggested that Ireland is radically behind in the provision of such services in comparison to many European countries. Despite a robust evidence base showing the value in safeguarding and promoting mental health in childhood, Ireland's child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, have a number of significant issues, which combined, diminish primary school children’s access to mental healthcare. These include a lack of services at community and school level, along with excessive waiting lists for specialist mental health treatment services. There is an urgent need for additional school-based mental health supports for primary school children in Ireland.

A relatively new service, called mental health support teams, has been developed in the UK over the past three years, which I know the members have seen and heard much about. It offers a model through which primary school children can receive the mental health awareness and support they require. The NPC believes that a service based on this model should be established in Ireland on a pilot basis as a matter of urgency, and that subject to evaluation, the service should be expanded and made available on a national basis. The service would need cross-departmental and interagency partnership, particularly across the Departments of Health and Education. Such a service would not only strengthen and support the mental well-being of thousands of children, but would also support parents and teachers, and would reduce the number of children requiring specialist mental health treatment and support from CAMHS, as has been evidenced in the UK.

The NPC welcomes the recent funding announcement of €5 million to establish a pilot mental health support service in primary schools. It is the NPC’s belief that this funding will be most effectively used piloting a robust wraparound, whole-school-community approach to mental health supports in primary school. This type of service, as demonstrated in the UK, has the potential to make a real difference to children’s lives. We caution against putting single counselling interventions into schools without the other supports offered by the mental health support teams. This has been tried in other jurisdictions and has shown to have many governance and implementation difficulties. I thank the committee again for inviting me to attend today on behalf of parents.