Mr. Craig Petrie:

On behalf of the Association of Community and Comprehensive Schools, ACCS, I thank the committee for the invitation to appear before it. In the past number of years, we have become aware that mental health impacts have been significant in our adolescents. Access to guidance counselling and pastoral care or student support teams within schools remains the first port of call for many of our young people. In the absence of readily available mental health supports within the community or in clinical settings, schools act as a de facto emergency department for mental health and well-being difficulties.

The guidance allocation for schools is set out by the Department of Education. The role of our guidance counsellors has changed and evolved enormously in the past decade. With the introduction of the new junior cycle, the whole school guidance plan now covers just that - the whole school - in which the guidance allocation forms part of student support and is a pillar of well-being, both as a curricular item and as a tangible for our students’ lives. That is a lot. The ACCS would also note that our community and comprehensive schools with further education programmes do not get a career guidance teacher allocation for those programmes.

Providing schools in our sector with this allowance is essential if our learners are to benefit from the SOLAS national further education and training, FET, strategy.

Many mental health difficulties manifest in adolescence. In addition, we can now see a measurable increase in mental health difficulties. That increase is to crisis levels. In our submission, we have cited a study that lays out "a growing need to implement policies that will help children and adolescents cope with the short-term and long-term psychological effects of the pandemic". Schools see these issues every day, and every day we have to triage our time and attention based on what we know about those we already support educationally and pastorally and what we may need to do for the broken child in front of us now or for the terrified parent on the phone.

The physical activity and well-being study, PAWS, showed an increase in depressive symptoms across adolescents during school closures. This is borne out in our schools too. It is a significant challenge. We are finding that, even outside the overwhelmed guidance counselling support we can offer and that can only be spread so thin, our special education teaching, SET, allocation remains stretched beyond breaking point by the surge in academic and well-being needs brought about by multiple school closures.

We look for help outside our walls, and we acknowledge the work of organisations and agencies that listen to us and try to help. Formally, links between schools and NEPS continue to be good on an individual basis, but schools observe that the level of day-to-day support is compromised by the small number of referrals that schools can make to a psychologist in a given year. The current focus of NEPS on emotionally based school avoidance is necessary and welcome and it is working, but the service's time is finite and its resources are meagre, which means that other areas are not being addressed at the level they were before 2020.

Links between the education sector and health services through local CDNTs are inconsistent and the provision of CAHMS remains different from region to region. In both cases, staffing means that waiting lists vary but are always prohibitively long and students in senior years can age out of services before they reach the front of the queue. It should never be the advice of any principal or education professional that bringing a self-harming child to an emergency department is the quickest way to access significant services. On foot of these issues, the response of schools will continue to be individual and often based not necessarily on best practice, but on the practical availability of care for the students in our respective geographical areas. A large amount still remains reliant on the relationships that school staff have with individuals in local services rather than on developed and established pathways.

Schools are fortunate. Every year, we get an allocation of teachers based on our enrolment numbers and, in general, schools can appoint teachers to fill those posts. We know how strongly that contrasts with therapist roles in the HSE across all geographical areas, which are both under-resourced and underfilled. Unless and until mental health services are brought to a level that matches the increasing needs of our young people, schools will continue to bear the brunt of this.

When we train our new teachers, it could be that basic training in mental health would be of benefit to our students. It makes sense for this training to be given through initial teacher education or through the Droichead qualification process. Our teachers of social, personal and health education, SPHE, and relationships and sexuality education, RSE, and our student support teams are conversant in this and have experience working with adolescents who might suffer from poor mental health. It could be a good thing that all of our classroom teachers would know that this is something for them to understand and assist with, in the same way that education for students with additional needs has moved into the wheelhouse of the classroom teacher rather than just being the job of the support teacher. However, in doing this, we might normalise the idea that schools are the place for this intervention.

Student voice initiatives in schools are important and can help the development of student-centred and student-led solutions, but we are the adults in the room and it is important that we deal with issues around poor mental health. Schools cannot keep carrying this. We do not have the professional expertise. We are juggling with students' health and we are terrified of dropping a ball. We do not have the time. As long as we continue to act in place of proper services, students will continue to fall between the cracks and schools will continue to have to choose whether we support a child in mental health crisis at the cost of the child with a specific learning difficulty. Some of these choices will have a cost. In our submission, we have pointed to a need for policy, for pathways and for adequate people to be in place across services, of which education is just one. We all need a co-ordinated approach to this if we are to help our children.