Ms Róisín Webb:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak to members today on this important topic. We are pleased to be here. A number of members of the coalition are with me and will be available to answer questions. I will provide introductory remarks which I will keep as brief as possible. With me are Eleanor McClorey from Young Ballymun, Marie-Louise Neary from Headstrong, Annette Clarke, schools facilitator in the Jigsaw Meath project, which was referred to earlier, and Moira Leydon from the ASTI. We expected to attend before the committee on 24 April 2013 and had lined up Professor Margaret Barry, an international expert on this topic, to speak. She addressed a seminar we held last March, which was excellent.

I would like to let the committee know that Professor Barry is not available today but would be available on 24 April if members would like to hear more about this topic.

We welcome the fact that the guidelines have been published. It is an important development. The coalition comprises approximately 55 member organisations from a range of backgrounds and sectors ranging from the children's rights and human rights sectors to the educational and mental health services sector.

We made a submission to the Department of Education and Skills last September on the topic of mental health in the education system. We welcome the publication of the guidelines and the fact that they adopt a whole-school approach. Young people's mental health and well-being are recognised as fundamental to the achievement of educational goals. The economic benefits of early intervention in the area of mental health are well established. Schools are uniquely placed to promote positive mental health but also to pick up on and be an early identifier of students who are in distress and to be a referral point for students.

Members will have copies of a document I prepared. I will not have the time to go through all of it but I will bring the members briefly through it. Studies have shown that it is important to move beyond an individual curriculum-based focus or classroom focus and instead to have a whole-school complex approach to mental health promotion. It is a multi-component approach which involves the whole school and the community, with different levels of intervention and a wide range of people involved. It is quite a complex model to put in place but it is very worthwhile for schools and communities to implement it. There are good examples of how this is being done in Ireland. We have the Jigsaw Meath project, as was mentioned, and Young Ballymun is doing excellent work with primary schools in adopting a whole-school approach. While the guidelines are a very welcome development, vital factors are missing in terms of their implementation, which are needed if the guidelines are to become a reality in schools.

I will first address the issue of resources, which many members raised with the representatives of the Department of Education and Skills. The guidelines for mental health do not bring with them any additional resources to ensure their successful implementation. Schools are expected to implement the guidelines within already thinly stretched resources but fundamentally without access to any additional professional consultation or support. We consider the need for such financial support or resources as twofold, and recognising the fact that there has been a change in the allocation of funding for guidance counsellors, this is all the more crucial.

Schools may need advice, training and support on how best to implement a whole-school approach to this area. While the guidelines provide some guidance on this, which I welcome, Ms Margaret Grogan from the National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, talked about the systemic work it does with schools. NEPS has continuously pointed out over the years that it is not sufficiently resourced to do that systematic work with schools to develop a psychologically supportive environment on the scale that is needed because the demands on it for psychological assessments are so high that it does not have the resources required. We argue that resources should be put in place to support schools in doing that.

Schools need to have access to backup and consultation on how to manage the mental health needs of individual students in the educational context. This can sometimes help to shift the focus from referral and assessment, which I appreciate is also important. However, other forms of advice and consultation for schools on how best to support the student within the school setting could involve NEPS, and they should also involve other agencies like CAMHS, the national education support service, and the National Education Welfare Board, NEWB. A range of agencies should be involved.

The lack of funding for implementation of the mental health guidelines is in stark contrast with the allocation of funding for the implementation of the anti-bullying guidelines. I point out for the information of the members that in Scotland it was recently announced that £1 million is to be allocated annually to implement its mental health in schools programme to increase training in specialist skills and service design. It introduced a self-assessment system in 2005, similar to the guidelines we published recently, but it found in recent reviews that this did not meet the requirements of schools. There was a lack of co-ordination, backup and consultation for schools. It has changed its approach on realising that there is a need for more intensive support. It sends out a signal in terms of the priority being given to mental health in the Department of Education and Skills that guidelines have not come with the resources required for their implementation.

I wish to move on to an issue that was raised with regard to clarity of responsibility and the interaction between agencies, which is crucial to the implementation of these guidelines. We need clarity about the relationship among schools, NEPS, CAMHS, primary care psychology services, the NEWB, the National Behaviour Support Service, NBSS, and the Special Education Support Service. Members of the coalition report to us and we have a broad range of mental health professionals involved as well, but there is a lack of clarity around the country on what their role is in terms of mental health in schools. The guidelines state: "As the availability and accessibility of services vary across the country, schools should identify the services available in their area and develop referral protocols with them." This is something to which the Department has referred. It is a very difficult task for schools to figure out on their own. It involves multiple factors, many of which are completely outside their control. I welcome the fact that Ms Margaret Grogan said that NEPS would be working closely with CAMHS on this, but this needs to be dealt with at a national level. There needs to be national policy for inter-agency co-operation, and agreed working practices need to be developed. Any mapping of this inter-agency work should incorporate key officials and senior responsibility for the implementation of the guidelines. This is crucial to establishing proper referral pathways for schools but also to having a consistent nationwide approach. I appreciate that services will differ in local areas. With the imminent appointment of a director of mental health services, there is an opportunity to assign senior responsibility for mental health in schools within that directorate, but it should also be jointly managed and overseen by the Department of Education and Skills in terms of senior responsibility for the area of mental health in schools. We consider this to be crucial.

Another element with regard to the implementation of the guidelines - this leads on from inter-agency collaboration - is the lack of a co-ordination office. We recommend that there should be a HSE liaison office that would advise, organise and oversee this joint agency approach. It would also provide schools with the necessary guidance and advice they need from mental health professionals. This could work at both national and regional level. There could be a national co-ordinator to ensure consistency but at a regional level such an office could facilitate schools in meeting in groups, which would provide for a better use of the various resources with the input of SPHE support staff, HSE health promotion staff, NEPS, NEBS, the Special Education Support Service, local GPs and primary care psychology services. That would provide for a sharing of resources and a sharing of the experience of the whole-school approach within schools, with schools building on knowledge and supporting each other on how to do this within the whole community. Those regional clusters could form part of a national schools mental health network and this could greatly enhance the three tiers of support within the guidelines - support for all, support for some and support for few. In our document we have outlined some of the ways in which that could be done. This would be a clever use of resources, and rather than directing resources to schools, it would maximise those resources and it would enhance inter-agency collaboration. Mental health and well-being in education spans many agencies, and there is a risk that without the assignation of responsibility and without a co-ordination body, this will fall between stools. This is something about which the coalition is very concerned.

I wish to address the final areas of teacher training and a roadmap for schools. Teacher training is an issue that has been raised. I would like to acknowledge the excellent work that the SPHE support service, NEPS and the HSE mental health promotion officers do in terms of providing training. Studies have shown that training in terms of mental health is patchy and inconsistent around the country. The resources of the SPHE support service, the HSE mental health promotion officers and NEPS are not sufficient to provide training on the scale that is needed to implement these guidelines. The coalition in its submission recommended that there should be initial teacher education and continuous professional development on mental health awareness and that this training should include how to recognise when a child or young person is in distress. It should be the responsibility of all teachers to understand and recognise needs in this area to feed into the whole-school approach. The coalition recommended that this should included in training for teachers at all levels, from preschool up to third level. We also stressed the importance of social and emotional learning for very young children in our submission.

It is important that the upskilling and training of teachers is not a one-off occurrence because research shows that it is important to the development of teacher competencies that one does not restrict it solely to training. Extensive evidence supports the need for coaching and feedback to realise the implementation of effective practices in the classroom. Again, we think there are great opportunities in terms of initial teacher training but also in the development of CPD. Within the guidelines there is reference to training that is available in mental health but no specific training has been designed for the implementation of the guidelines.

That leads me to the roadmap for schools in terms of implementing the whole-school approach. While we welcome the guidelines, in many ways the implementation of the whole-school approach is complex. It seeks to make changes in the social and learning environment, strengthen the structures of each school for addressing mental health promotion and promote links between the school and the community. We agree that it takes great commitment from the school and there is a need for school leadership, but we feel that the guidelines are not specific enough in providing the roadmap.

The groups Jigsaw and Headstrong are present today. A whole-school approach to mental health in schools has been put in place by Jigsaw in a small number of schools around the country and its model provides an example of a framework for putting in place a whole-school approach to mental health, as well as the kind of integration of services that is required and the supports that are necessary for schools to successfully implement it. While the guidelines do endorse a whole-school approach, we feel that the roadmap in those guidelines is not sufficiently clear or easy to put in place without those crucial supports for schools to ensure its implementation. We have people present who can answer questions on what is involved.

My final point relates to the guidelines for primary schools. The guidelines that have been produced relate only to post-primary schools. The coalition considers it crucial that guidelines on mental health and social and emotional well-being are introduced from preschools right up to the third level sector. At primary school level this kind of training is often referred to as social and emotional learning. These are critical competencies. They involve skills that help children to calm themselves when angry, to initiate friendships and to resolve conflicts respectfully. At primary school level there is widespread evidence that this kind of social and emotional development has a significant impact on a child’s ability to engage with and adapt to the demands of school.

Ms McClorey from Young Ballymun can tell members a bit more about the situation. Through the support of Young Ballymun, a number of primary schools in the area have implemented a whole-school approach to social and emotional learning. It is done through multi-level Incredible Years initiatives with teachers but also with children and parent components within it. The independent research recently published by Young Ballymun demonstrates significant improvements in the social and emotional well-being of children. A critical dimension to the success achieved in Ballymun is through the whole-school approach to children's social and emotional development based on the implementation of the evidence-based social and emotional learning, SEL, curriculum. It has been integrated in the classroom through management strategies embedded in the delivery of the parent programmes and community organisations. Such an ethos requires support structures. We recommend that the Department seek to put guidelines in place at primary level.