Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I understand in the crisis in the recruitment of social workers, youth workers who are not necessarily based with youth services would be a beneficial step. I will give an example. I met the principal of Trinity Comprehensive in Ballymun and we were talking about the issue of school avoidance and again they raised the difficulty with me. A child comes into school, there is a crisis for that child that may involve mental health and the child may need to go to a service. A teacher, an SNA or somebody else has to be deployed to bring that child to the intervention. What happens is, of course they do that in that scenario, but it is not a social worker doing it, it is a teacher or an SNA. A school like that then becomes chronically disabled by the large number of children who need those engagements every day. Of course, the school does everything it can to help the child but the difficulty is that it just does not have the manpower, the remit or the expertise. Often there can be "compassion burnout". I am sure Ms Duggan is familiar with that. Then those children get put onto those reduced timetables just for the school to try to disengage. The model of referral and transfer and the support of education is very important. I ask Ms Duggan to use the new models there, both the child poverty unit and these new area based interventions. Tusla are involved in both and I hope it will it do everything it can to try to ensure that roll-out. I think Ms Duggan has indicated that.