Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 29 November 2017

Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution

Ancillary Recommendations of the Citizens' Assembly Report: Discussion

1:30 pm

Mr. Eamonn Moran:

I will start with the last question. There are two elements to the well-being programme. One is the newly rolled out junior cycle well-being area of learning which covers SPHE, CSPE and PE. Some other elements could also be included.

This was rolled out to schools from September 2017 and will be reported on in the students' new junior cycle profile of achievement from June 2020. It is an exciting new area. Our junior cycle for teachers' continuous professional development, CPD, team has a particular well-being programme going out to schools to assist them in rolling out the programme. We are committing significant CPD resources to ensuring that the programme is rolled out well. I will make a point that might address one of the issues Senator Gavan has. An underlying emphasis of the well-being programme is that well-being is a whole-of-school activity, so it is not the case that when someone goes to a school and asks where he or she can learn about well-being, he or she is told to go to the guidance counsellor or the science teacher. The idea of the well-being programme is that it is a whole-of-school approach. All teachers are responsible for well-being in school, so one avoids a situation whereby in a specific well-being or guidance class the student is told about one set of issues regarding well-being and then goes into another class and sees no evidence of those issues in that class. All teachers are involved in the delivery of well-being. Well-being with a small W, which is the programme the Minister is seeking to roll out across primary and post-primary, essentially seeks to ensure that across the whole school system well-being is taught in an integrated way. The junior cycle framework is further down that road, but I think the Minister is keen to ensure that the lessons we have learned from the development of the junior cycle well-being programme can be spread across the whole school system.

Concerns have been expressed that as one goes into senior cycle and the leaving certificate heaves into view, the time spent on such areas decreases. Junior cycle teachers and those involved in delivering the well-being programme are typically also teachers at senior cycle level. Pending the delivery of the well-being programme for the whole school system, we know that the roll-out of the well-being programme in junior cycle will also assist in ensuring that well-being is embodied at senior cycle. Senator Gavan made the point about students saying they never received this education. I have spoken about this only within the past two days to my own two daughters, who are in their 20s now. They went to the same school. One said they never got it and the other said they got it in spades. I would make two points in this regard. First, it could be the case that different teachers might choose to deliver the SPHE and RSE programmes in different ways. In addition, depending on the ages or level of maturity of the individual students, they can receive this learning in different ways. It might only hit home with them at a later stage.

This brings me to another point I will make before I hand over to my colleague, Ms Egan, for any comments she may have. I made a point in the opening statement about age-appropriateness. We are asked why we do not teach primary school children about contraception and why we do not catch this at the very start of the schooling system. In developing the programmes for SPHE and RSE, the Department is guided by the requirement to ensure that this programme provision is delivered in an age-appropriate manner. We need to be careful that we do not hit students with something they are too young to understand and that they do not go away more confused about information we try to provide to them than before. Therefore, while some observers might consider that we should be teaching this in a more direct way at an earlier stage, there is a balance to be found between getting children at a young stage and confusing them with issues.

This brings me to the final point I will make on this issue. We have made the point very strongly that the provision particularly of SPHE and RSE is a partnership between the school and the parents. It should be remembered that the schoolteacher is delivering a programme to perhaps 15 or 20 pupils in a class and therefore needs to pitch the delivery of the programme at a certain level. As a parent of a child, I may have been involved with the school in developing in some cases the RSE policy. When I go to the school to determine whether I will put my child into the school, I will have been given sight of that school's RSE policy so I can decide whether the approach and the ethos underlying the provision of that policy is consistent with my expectations. Furthermore, when I see the layout of the programme and how it is proposed to be taught in the school, I can also decide from the home perspective, the parental perspective, to provide the input from the home and parental side of things to ensure that what the child is being taught in school is mirrored and tracked by what is being provided at home. This ensures consistency of messages between both education forums, and the parent might feel his or her child is at a certain stage at which the parent can perhaps supplement in a more direct way the information being provided in the school. I would emphasise the partnership approach between both the school and the parents regarding the provision of education in this area.