Ms Moira Leydon:

It is a bit difficult to follow all those very comprehensive and insightful presentations. My approach will look at second level schools and what we regard as institutional issues that need to be addressed in the contribution of schools to tackling childhood obesity.

I hardly need add to the analysis that has already been presented to the committee that schools are just one part of a social project to address this issue. It is a privilege to be here. We have appeared before the Joint Committee on Education and Skills on many occasions in recent months. One of the messages that is coming through from the stakeholders in education involves the complexity of the issues facing young people. We are not so sure if schools are now the only institution in society that can manage it. The committee is getting that message today. I laughed when Mr. Duffy referred to the idea of schools weighing children. This originated in Great Britain. It shows the way complex social issues such as childhood obesity and public health issues can receive a very opportunistic political response which says that teachers should weight kids and that this will suddenly address the issues. That type of response is not in the Irish tradition, thank God, but we should be very wary of it.

To return to the focus of my presentation, one analysis we need to do regarding childhood obesity is that it is a public health issue. We have voluminous evidence in the Irish context of the relationship between socioeconomic status and health status. We also have significant evidence from home, the EU and the OECD regarding the extent of relative poverty in Ireland and the way children are disproportionately affected, so we have this complex relationship between socioeconomic status, opportunities and child well-being, including physical health. This shows the complexity of the issue. However, the good news is that interventions do work and work particularly well for poorer children. It is always important to be realistic when we critique systems. Yes, interventions work and work best for poorer children but they also work best when they are introduced early and consistently.

From a second-level point of view, one of the very disturbing findings from the 2013 landmark ESRI research on physical activity among young people was that at primary level, students demonstrate pretty good patterns of recommended activity but this drops massively at second level. We really need to look a bit further at why this is happening. The ESRI research in 2013, and later in 2015 and 2017, found that 90% of schools are not providing the recommended two hours per week of physical education. The research asked the schools why this was the case. The reasons were that 64% of schools said they did not have space or facilities, which is a really significant issue which I will discuss in a moment, while 23% of schools said they did not provide the recommended two hours because of staffing issues - they did not have enough staff. The issue of supervision of students opting out of PE also arose regarding the question of who was going to supervise them. Finally, an issue arose with which we are all very familiar, namely, the academic nature of our curriculum. A total of 21% of schools said that curriculum choices meant that they did not give the time. The 2015 Lifeskills survey found that only 32% of schools had healthy eating policies. A total of 27% of schools had vending machines. I am not saying this to criticise schools - that is not my job - I am saying it to give some of the facts. A total 27% of schools said they had vending machines. It is a huge income stream for schools. While we may have very good policies, etc., we also have the hard reality that schools need income streams.

The other point I would make is that the current framework for health promotion in schools dates from the 1990s and really needs to be reviewed at this stage. Since then, we have had the 2013 guidelines for second-level mental health and the well-being programme in the junior cycle curriculum in 2015 so we now see huge fragmentation of policy. There needs to be a coherence in policy. We need to bring these policies together. One of the things we say in second-level education is that everybody wants the whole school approach but without being cynical, quite frequently, the whole school approach ends up being everybody's business and nobody's responsibility. Who is actually going to drive this, evaluate it and make sure it happens? Of course, the ASTI will make the point that the impact of austerity on our schools has been corrosive with regard to leadership structures in schools. We found repeatedly in our research that what is happening in the absence of leadership structures is that everything is devolving to the classroom teacher so it is nobody's responsibility. Classroom teachers teach French or science. They do not necessarily have the skills or ambition to engage in these broader projects. It is a matter of achieving this balance between what I would call the policy and the implementation gap. We need to look at the institutional factors that are keeping that gap wide in our system.

I would make two recommendations to this committee that could be brought into the policy space. First, we have some fantastic new school buildings. We have amazing canteens and fantastic PE facilities - not just the gym and football pitches. The new PE syllabus for the leaving certificate, which can examined as a leaving certificate subject, has a range of sports and activities such as track events, volleyball, all sorts of ball games with rackets and proper gym facilities rather than just a PE hall because many young people are into the gym and being fit. Our new schools are models in this regard but the sad fact is that most of our schools are pretty old institutions with poor infrastructure. I suggest that the Department of Education and Skills needs to conduct an audit of the actual state of facilities for PE, sports and games in schools, particularly older schools, so that we have evidence for policy. Again, I come back to this policy implementation gap and rhetoric. At the end of the day, rhetoric really cheeses people off. As legislators and scrutineers of the Estimates and the budget, members need to start looking at capital expenditure budget for schools and what is actually going into improving facilities that will lead to better capacity in schools with regard to physical activity, etc. There is a lot more to say but we need to hear from the members.