Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair. On well-being in primary education, I welcome the significant support from this committee. I know it has done much work on well-being. I will give a quick update. We have two pilots running. In the first, there is one-to-one engagement with a counsellor, with the provision of eight engagements. There are 733 blocks of eight being provided across the seven counties that are within this pilot. It is very new and innovative but we will learn an extraordinary amount from it about the role of counselling services like this in primary schools. We have well-being practitioners, which are in four other clusters in the country too. We have 15 well-being practitioners being trained up in that respect. There is significant learning from the primary school point of view.

From the post-primary point of view, which the Chair raised with me before, we recently announced that we have gone out to tender for additional supports in the well-being area for post-primary schools. That would involve an outside provider coming in to support the well-being teams that are already in existence in every school to work with students, parents and staff and generally to be an additional support in the school system. We envisage that that would run over a two to three-year period initially and that there would be engagement across the school sector at post-primary level, with an additional well-being resource. When the tender is completed, we will have a better view of who will be involved, what it will involve and so on. The general theme here is that there will be additional well-being supports going into post-primary schools.

There is ongoing engagement between the Department of Health and the HSE, especially with well-being and health supports in the community and all that. I want to recognise that, notwithstanding the Cathaoirleach's view that there should perhaps be a task force on that going forward. Maybe there is an opportunity for that going forward. I salute the fact we have benefitted enormously from a positive working relationship with both the Department of Health and the HSE. This new innovation at post-primary will be interesting as well. It will probably inform the direction on the long-term basis for post-primary level as well.