Mr. Bernard O'Regan:

I will raise that with my colleague on the mental health side as an issue that has been raised, and we will come back to the committee with a response. As I do not know what work, if any, they are doing on that, I do not want to mislead the Deputy. I will come back on that. I will make a similar response to his point about counselling services being run on a voluntary basis and the value of mainstreaming them to build on their efficacy and the contribution they are making. I will also raise that with my colleague on the mental health side. That is also something that falls within their remit. I would not know enough but I will raise it and we will come back to the Deputy on it.

In terms of the vacancy rate and recruitment, as I said to Deputy Cairns, the vacancy rate is one of the huge challenges in the children's service. The point about how well they can work when they have the right staffing is well made by the Deputy. It is the case, and it is why we are working towards the policy implementation we are, because we believe it will have better outcomes for children and their families. However, the staffing level is hugely challenging. We are doing international and national recruitment. We are trying to increase the numbers of staff. It is not a money issue. We have funding for the posts. In other years I might have been here saying that we have to fight for funding. That is not the actual issue for us. The issue is trying to get enough suitably qualified people to meet the needs of children. We are trying to progress some work that is not reliant on a limited pool of staff. We are looking at things like therapy assistant grades or any of those supports, or additional administrative staff to free up clinical staff who might be spending too much time doing administration. We want to enhance our administration so we can release clinical staff to do therapies. We are progressing all of those measures but fundamentally, it comes down to the need to find the pool of people. That is not just for the vacancies we have now. We want to grow these services, and as our population grows we will need to grow these services. It is not just for now, we will need to be enhancing our recruitment capacity for the coming decade. I will ask Ms. O'Neill to comment on the assessment of CHO 9 and the schools.