Mr. Paul King:

The theme that is emerging for me, and which is consistent across all our presentations, is the idea of anxiety within students themselves and also within teachers. The opportunity to attend to that comes from giving students and teachers the opportunity to trust their judgment and skill set. Schools are wonderful environments, but may be a bit like the Dáil which in some ways can be almost at one remove from society. That is because there is a world inside the school and a world outside it also. Mr. Hussey's work attempts to meet the needs of young people in terms of what their world is beyond school. I am involved in teacher education training and we must examine how we can get those two worlds connected. Senator Ruane touched on the gap between the life of the community and that of the school.

Deputy Catherine Martin referred to the issue of mindfulness. As a concept, mindfulness is interesting because there is a great degree of knowledge at some level in contemporary society around the possibilities for mindfulness. Because teachers and educators are so hungry to be able to attend to these issues, what we see emerging in schools is like: "This is going to be the next panacea. This is going to solve the issue."

We know that mental health issues are complex and therefore it is a cause of concern if educators, understandably, reach out to take hold of something that might support their students. However, we need to do it cautiously so that they are doing that in abidance with good practice and not adding to the damage that is there. That is the general point I wanted to make in response to Deputy Martin's query about mindfulness. It has lots of potential but we need to begin with teachers and educators first. We began the conversation with children whereas we need to begin it with children and educators. Both must be in parallel.