Ms Hilary McAlea:

Our model is bespoke in that it responds to the needs of individual pupils in schools. I am currently the acting principal. I have been the deputy principal and the home-school liaison co-ordinator. I was also a junior infant teacher for years. We speak about housing and homelessness and about when the housing crisis started. There is hidden homelessness in Moyross. The houses were knocked. It was in cases of families living intergenerationally in the home that we started to see developmental delays for some of the children. There was no space to go down on the ground and learn to crawl. A child who is living between nana's house and mam's house during the day might spend a lot of time in their stroller or buggy going up and down. The public health nurses, PHNs, and the local speech and language therapists, SLTs, noticed this and pointed it out to us in school. This is where we constantly developed and evolved our model to support our families. We brought in our own play therapist and our own adult counsellor. She worked from the back of the church initially. We now have our own dedicated family centre but the counsellor became known as the lady at the back of the church.

Our current principal, Tiernan O'Neill, is seconded to the council at the moment. He was the home-school liaison co-ordinator and was going out into the homes and realising what the need was on the ground. This has constantly evolved as we have seen the need. It became apparent that housing and employment were often the fundamental reasons people came looking for counselling and supports and children were suffering from anxiety and low self-esteem. We then realised we needed a family support worker, in addition to the home-school liaison co-ordinator, dedicated to the housing and supports piece alone. Again, another philanthropic funder supported us with our family support worker.

That key worker is now working with local companies in Limerick, including Johnson and Johnson and Takumi, which offer bespoke employment opportunities. We are working with the education and training board on an apprenticeship with Moyross Youth Academy. This did not happen overnight. The school has been there since 1983 and I joined in 1987. This has grown from a philosophy and ethos.

We are very lucky that our clinical psychologist provides all the supervision to the school pro bono, and that has always been the case. Our assistant psychologist is HSE funded. We apply for a grant every year and we were very fortunate to have been the first school in Ireland to receive that grant. We keep applying for different philanthropic grants to grow our play therapy. Even those within the play therapy are unique to each therapist. They will have different training and backgrounds. We recently employed a youth mental health worker, which is very similar to another model having talked to Ms Lynch. Our youth mental health worker, who has a psychology degree, is using sport and cognitive-behavioural therapy, CBT, as well as a variety of different methodologies, to connect and build relationships with children, which is primarily focused on the transition to secondary school. We are due to publish an independent report on research, conducted through Mary Immaculate College, on this programme. One of the key findings of interviews with past pupils is that this transition piece is huge in children's lives. You have to be there to support the children.

As for the next phase, Rethink Ireland has been great to help us with strategic planning. We are teachers and we were not thinking of things from a business perspective in how to get funding. Rethink Ireland has supported us to look at different systems. For our next three-year plan, we are looking at continuing to support our teenagers in the community and to bring our past pupils back into the school hub. That is done by clustering with our local secondary school and the school's completion project.

We are using everything that is out there. It is a working synergy and we are bringing everything together. We are more like the frugal housewife, looking at what we have. It is, ultimately, built on relationships with key people on the ground who have worked together over the past 20 years and who put children at the centre.