Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 22 November 2022
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills
Mental Health Supports in Schools and Tertiary Education: Discussion (Resumed)
Ms Kathleen Moran:
It is the other way round. The JCSP is in 223 schools and 30 of those schools have libraries and librarians. Of the cohort of students we focus on, as I said, initially 4% of them used public library services. There are lots of reasons for that but, in some cases, they would be adjacent and they would be in cities and towns, but they just do not see the public library service as being for them, or their families do not. We did some follow-up research a number of years later with students who had one of our libraries from first year at second level and they were now in fifth or sixth year. That researcher found that some 50% of those students now used their public library service for borrowing, but also perhaps for study space or whatever, because they had been introduced to it through the school. Again, I come back to saying that if we want to engage young people in these services, we have to get them at school level, and they will move on from that.