Mr. Paul King:

I thank the Chairman and members of the committee for the invitation to attend here today. I am grateful for the opportunity to address this significant and crucial aspect of positive mental health in schools.

It is a positive and welcome development that despite the prevalence of mental health issues in society, over the past number of years there has been a greater appreciation of mental health being an important issue for young people. Quite a considerable amount of evidence has been gathered over the past 30 years that tells us what works and what is helpful in assisting young people to manage and work through issues of mental health. That is all welcome. The impact of some interventions includes, for example, the impact it has on the academic learning of students, staff well-being, pupil well-being and the development of what one might call social and emotional skills among young people, as well as improving what might be called a risk behaviour and helping young people to deal with mental health problems. All of that is very welcome because sometimes we can be quite negative and regressive in terms of wondering whether we have moved or advanced. It is not all regressive and, in fact, we are heading in the general right direction.

I would like to make two principal points. First, there is a temptation to believe that promoting and encouraging positive responses to mental health might be met through the application of curriculum reform, measures and interventions, all of which are really important.

However, notwithstanding the value of formal curricular interventions, the recently published guidelines on well-being for both primary and second level schools and the recent guidelines for well-being in junior cycle foreground the presence of culture, ethos and environment in promoting a dynamic, optimal development. Such a relationship is at the heart of this and my colleague in DCU, Dr. Maeve O'Brien, talks about the care ethic principle in this regard. We need to hold in our minds that while we can advance many positive initiatives, at the heart of the issue is promoting, encouraging and developing the experience of positive relationships for young people. It involves learning about well-being but it is also for well-being.

I welcome the work of the national task force on youth mental health, which brought together a number of bodies with an interest in this area, but educators on the ground might not know what is happening so we need to make the work more cohesive and integrate it into the experience of students and teachers. I recommend a national forum specifically dedicated to the mental health of young people, not to replace the existing national task force but to have the specific purpose of working with teachers at primary and secondary level.

Teachers are saying they know what to do and how to go about it but the challenge for many educators is time. A whole-school approach is now a core aspect of mental health and this needs sufficient allocated time, particularly at second level because primary school teachers have the advantage of having one class and they know their students well. Second level is more disjointed so it would be positive to formally allocate time for people with real passion and interest and who can support a directive, a strategy and a proactive response to working with students to promote a positive mental health culture in schools.

A lot of interventions are targeted towards young people and these can be very effective but teachers often have a sense of feeling inadequate and, while they wish to embrace the important issue of mental health, they also feel a lack of capacity at times. It is important to work with teachers and encourage their desire to work with young people to enhance their development. We also need to give teachers support because there is an expectation that teachers can be caring experts in school but that is not the case. They need support. There may be a need for specialised interventions, such as guidance counsellors and mental health professionals, but there is a need for specialised support in some sectors and Dr. Tony Bates of Jigsaw provides some of this. I am not sure we have enough to deal with the plethora of issues facing schools. Perhaps a feasible solution is to designate a team of mental health professionals within a region to respond to the needs of all its schools, rather than every school having a professional mental health practitioner.

I welcome the targeted programmes and interventions but I am concerned that some of the interventions tend to be imported from other cultures and communities. They have a great richness and evidence-based practice behind them but there might be some merit in looking at what we can do within our own cultural experience. We are somewhat behind other countries in terms of cultural mix, development and growth and we need to respect the fact that we operate at a different pace. Our mindfulness programmes come from different countries such as the UK, America and Australia and there might be an opportunity to cultivate similar programmes from an Irish context, which would be equally respectful of diversity.