Ms Anne O'Rourke:

When I worked in NEPS, we were given the broad guideline that one assessment would take about a day and a half of a NEPS psychologist’s time. This is a huge investment of time when a psychologist might cover 30 or more schools. In my private practice, it is generally a parent-led assessment. When I meet a child, the actual assessment part takes roughly two hours, and then I may spend up to an hour and a half talking to the parents about it. Before I see a child, I will have gathered a lot of data and information from both the parents and teachers. If I were to say one thing, it would be that we need to include the voice of the child where possible.

One simple thing I thought of last night was that we do a census every year and we could put a question into the census for children to give their opinion or view on some aspect of education and how they think it could be improved. That would be a simple thing.

Another simple thing to get the voice of the child and to get a wonderful record of a child's development, in primary school in particular, is if in addition to the end of year school report card, there was a one-page document the child filled in where they drew a picture of themselves, you would have a sample of their handwriting, what they like, what they do not like, how a teacher could help them and what they would like to learn. That piece of data is missing sometimes from the assessment process.

The assessment of need, AON, is a different ball game, generally speaking, for a NEPS psychologist. Then you would have more complex cases that could take days and days of their time if they were doing an assessment for an individual child, because they will always put in the time required.