Dr. Tony Bates:

I will pick up one or two themes from my colleagues, Paul King and Shane Martin, and build on them. I will focus my thoughts on the problem of fear. Fear is pervasive in our schools, both among significant numbers of students and among teachers. I will propose three simple, but revolutionary, ways that I believe will reduce fear.

I will first talk about students. In 2012, we did the My World Survey with 700 school-going students aged from 12 to 18 years. Anxiety was very high among one in three of them. It was much higher than expected and higher than depression, anger, stress and other issues. A teacher in Tramore recently told me that in the last ten years each cohort of students she has seen has been more and more anxious, one more than the last. Interestingly, she said they were more anxious about smaller things, as though they have lost a capacity to deal with some of the issues. There are very real reasons that they are afraid. Certainly, in Jigsaw we see fear as the major reason for anxiety. It is fear that they are not good enough, do not have what it takes, that they will let us down and that failure they have experienced in the past will be their experience yet again and it is only a matter of time. They are on tenterhooks. They bring all of that fear packed in their backpacks every morning, so it is hard to learn and pay attention. When they do not learn and they fail at school, that further reinforces a sense of not being good enough and it appears to reinforce the thing of which they are most afraid. This leads to drop-out. It leads to a great deal of attention-seeking and distracting and disruptive behaviour. It also can have a very negative impact on their colleagues in the classroom. That is the student sphere.

Regarding the fear in teachers, many of the problems in society are landed at the doors of schools and teachers are expected to pick them up. We expect a great deal of them. The reality is that they are ordinary people doing an extraordinary job, but with very little support and particularly around mental health issues. We have given them a great deal more responsibility and autonomy in this area, but we have not backed it up with the supports they need in terms of their confidence, their abilities to engage on these issues and the supports they need from outside that can surround the school and bring some measure of comfort to teachers that when somebody is at risk they know there is a pathway to care for that person.

We found that teachers are afraid. In the past year I have visited many schools and listened to many teachers. The most common word I have heard is "spooked". They are quite spooked by certain behaviour such as self-harm and suicide across school populations and terrified that if they engage with something they might inadvertently make it worse, or that the person might then do something terrible and they would feel responsible. I was in a school last week where there has been a suicide. The teachers feel quite shattered and more afraid of all the remaining students. That has a very contagious effect on them.

I should also mention that while schools can be very frightening places for students and even teachers, they can also be immensely protective places for mental health. This is perhaps the strongest argument for building more capacity in schools. Young people coming from painfully toxic family situations can find a different experience of themselves in schools. They can take on a new identity where they are believed in and encouraged in what they are good and best at in their lives. That is a remarkable gift of schools.

With regard to fear, let us think about how fear is reduced. It is a practical problem for any of us. It is reduced when there is, first, some safety - it can be a person or a place - where we are allowed to express that fear. For most people, we are allowed to articulate it. However, we can also be allowed to express fear in art and in theatre. Then, and this is important, we are allowed to hold it in mind. We are allowed to sit with it and think about it, until some creative and meaningful insight comes about what we can do next. Young people need that from teachers but a teacher cannot offer that unless they are feeling somewhat calm and safe, and they cannot feel calm and safe until they have a means to be held and supported by each other or by people who might work with the teachers to give them an opportunity to talk these things through. Teachers do not so much need solutions as they need opportunities to think about what is happening in their school at the time. They are very creative people. When they are given those opportunities solutions emerge that none of us could think of and that are not written in books, because they are bespoke solutions for that child or school. I have seen this many times and can give examples if asked.

For the last couple of years Jigsaw has been working on a notion of a listening school, a school where it becomes possible to listen to all the voices and all the players so we begin to get a sense of what is happening in the school with the students and we begin collectively to take ownership of this and work out what to do. We have worked in several schools in Meath and the work in Meath was part of an Oireachtas report some years ago. The committee asked for recommendations, so I will discuss what I would like to see happening and what we would propose to make happen. We have all articulated concerns about schools and particularly about the role of teachers, who are the carriers of change. Government may instigate change but teachers will carry that change. They must feel ownership and confident. However, what is their experience and how capable do they feel around mental health? What is helping them and what is not helping them? We do not know this. All of us have informed opinions and anecdotes, but we do not really know. It would be interesting to think of how to gather that data in a nuanced way. We have some thoughts about that which I can refer back to.

The second issue is that if what teachers need most are opportunities to think through what is happening in their experience with students, how can we create time and shared learning opportunities for them to come together?

That may be done by bringing together clusters of five or eight schools. I have held many teacher meetings, with anything from ten to 80 participants, where people take time to think through what is happening in our schools. Sadly, they are often held in the wake of suicide and it is part of a debriefing but those moments allow people hear each other speak about what they want for their school. There is a great opportunity through communities of practice to have teachers take ownership and learn from each other, as well as learn from us.

Finally, it is to bring services closer to the school. We do that but teachers need to know there is a safety net for them and for their students when issues emerge that clearly indicate that a person is at risk. It can be a nightmare at 5 o'clock on a Friday evening when they are just about to go home and something comes up or 12 noon on a Tuesday when they do not know where to turn. We need to mobilise those services to support them and not leave it all to them.

Our vision for schools is to improve the health of schools to ensure they are healthy, not unhealthy, places and that there is a change of ownership throughout the entire school. That requires listening to students. I did not say enough that one of the aspects central to all our work in schools is to have the student voice, and we have young people here today, spoken in key meetings in schools. It is both calming for teachers because they hear what is going on and their great fear is that they are not picking up what is happening, but also in terms of the creativity of students. Whether it is through student councils or peer mentoring, these are fabulous ways to get young people involved. Generally, there needs to be an ownership around that. There needs to be enhanced collaboration between schools and agencies, more capacity given to teachers and active engagement young people. It is about fear and us listening to what is happening, and creating opportunities for teachers and students to listen to themselves and each other.