Ms Eileen O'Rourke:

I will refer to some of the issues raised by Senators Mullen and Pauline O'Reilly. I take the point that a chaplain can be enormously supportive resource in a school. However, many of our schools do not serve Catholic populations. We have a wide range of Educate Together schools, community and national schools and non-designated schools in the ETB system. I do not mind what an extra support person is called in the school but if we are to be truly inclusive, we need counsellors who are trained to support a wide range of students. We should perhaps widen our thinking a little. Do we need to take a teacher out of a school in order that he or she can return as a guidance counsellor or counsellor? Can we train counsellors who are not necessarily teachers to go directly into schools? I know staffing is a huge issue at the moment.

Another point that was raised, one to which I referred in my opening statement, was cultural awareness training. If our schools are to be meaningfully inclusive in the way they operate, we need to address a lot of issues. Professor Dympna Devine published a study not long ago which showed that over 95% of our teachers are white and Eurocentric in their views. We have black children and children who are gay or may have a disability who can go through the entire system and never see themselves positively reflected anywhere. I am doing a small study at the moment. Students, while they acknowledge black history month and cultural awareness week, say that when they return to the classroom where the important stuff happens the curriculum is white, fully-abled and straight. There are very practical things we can do around that to help people feel less othered, more included and positively reflected in our system. Obviously, that will help with students' level of engagement and their self-worth and self-esteem.