Ms ?ine Lynch:

The first question was around our parents sessions. In 2012, we started doing sessions with parents, supported by the Department of Education, around anti-bullying and it was part of the new action plan on bullying. When we started doing those sessions, we were talking about things like resilience with children and how to promote it. We touched on it through active listening and developing that parent-child relationship. Parents told us they wanted more of that and they wanted to know more about how to support their children's positive mental health.

At that time, we partnered with St. Patrick's Mental Health Services, and the background to why our report was written together is that we have been working together for some time on that.

We developed the session with St. Patrick's Mental Health Services, based on our understanding of parenting and its expertise around mental health services and supporting young people and children in that area. We now deliver those sessions in schools with groups of parents. We have a panel of trainers who do a lot of other training that we do as well and they deliver those sessions face-to-face. Over Covid we did them online. We were not quite sure whether they would be effective online but they were exceptionally effective, so we now have a mixed model. We do some of the sessions online and we do others in schools with groups of parents. They get very positive evaluations from the parents, and we evaluate all sessions. That has continued. In the last three years we have extended it to early years education, so we now provide a different session to parents of children in early years settings about how to promote positive mental health among young children and carry that on through. They have been working very well.

The difficulty with the single counselling sessions is that we are responding to two different things. We are trying to respond to early intervention and prevention, which is the model we are looking at in the clustering. We know there are many children and young people in crisis at the moment. The desire to help children who are in crisis at the moment is sometimes where the idea of single counselling sessions comes from. We know setting up a cluster model is not going to take a long time, but it is about the child experiencing the difficulty now. We are constantly balancing between trying to support the child in crisis now and developing a long-standing model, so I see where the single counselling sessions have come from. My concern about them is that it is not a well-governed system. You buy it in and it comes in, but who is responsible? Who is responsible for the qualifications of the counsellors? Who is responsible for the supervision and guidance of support in the school? Who is ensuring the student in the middle of it is getting the most effective support they need? How does the principal access it? It is not a principal's area of expertise to know which counselling services to bring in, so that is a concern.

When you look at the model that talks about clustering schools and putting wraparound services in place, you are talking about supporting teachers in their role, supporting the students in individual and group work and supporting parenting. That model for better outcomes for children has been shown in evidence to have a much bigger impact. We have shifted from understanding that the supports need to be where the child is, which is in the school and not in a health centre somewhere, to having to understand what are the best supports to have in that centre. Ensuring they are multidisciplinary and approaching that early intervention and prevention piece is essential in that. I hope that answers the question.