Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is a very imposing Chamber. I am delighted the Seanad has chosen to debate this subject. Knowing that the Seanad is composed of many people who gave their lives to education before they entered the House, I do not need to tell them how important well-being is as a subject for concern in our education system. It is the key to young people realising their potential and being able to take care of themselves in their lives with all the challenges it throws up. It is key to coping with stresses which are all too prevalent in the lives of young people now and it is key to giving people a proper sense of belonging and purpose in their lives. In every dimension, a young person's capacity to develop well-being underpins their success. It is really important we think of it in positive terms. There are far greater pressures now on our young people than there were in our time. I speak as a relatively older Member at this stage, but it is true even for many younger people. The prevalence of social media, the expectations that young people put upon themselves, the role models they aspire to be like and their increasing savvy and expectations about the world around them have transformed the environment in which they work. While for many young people it is a huge and empowering experience, there is no doubt it puts demands on young people's resilience. We have to look at how we achieve positive well-being. This subject can be more easily thought of in terms of what we do when things go wrong and how good we are at intervening and developing the services to catch things when they go wrong. As in many areas of public policy, we need to identify ambition and targets in a positive dimension of well-being rather than simply looking at our speed of intervention when things go wrong. That is where education can play a hugely important role. Our education services can feel they are expected to produce a response to everything, whether it is learning to drive or learning to cope with every pressure that exists. That can put pressure on our education system. The one thing I have learned since I started to engage in the area of well-being is how much people already working in our schools realise that this is an absolutely vital element of what they do. It is not one of the areas where people feel something is being put upon them. Teachers see every day of the week that these are the problems they confront in their classrooms and they need to know the coping skills to deal with them. I am very keen to put this in a positive dimension. I have spoken to representatives in other countries. None has really developed what they mean by well-being in terms of how we know we are delivering. It will be a challenge for us as we roll out our programmes.

I will speak about some of the things we are doing. There are a lot of very exciting things happening. Over the next five years, every school will have a well-being strategy. There are already guidelines at primary and post-primary level. We are now engaged in the active roll-out. It is supported by a number of national agencies and support services. There are six indicators of success which put front and centre the ambition that every child be active, responsible, connected, resilient, respected and aware. Those are six domains where a school can very positively contribute to the positive engagement of young people in their lives. There have been guidelines sent out to every school and they are now in the process of bringing them to life. There are a number of key support services engaged in helping schools to build the capacity to do this. It comes from the leadership service, the CPD service, the National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, and the newly formed Special Education Support Service, SESS. The idea is that schools develop the capacity to do their own self-evaluation and planning and set out a programme looking at the various elements of school policy, culture, curriculum and relationships and the way they can impact on young people. It is a really positive programme. The second area in which we are very actively engaged is strengthening the whole guidance plan that every school at second level now has. We have restored 400 of the 600 guidance counsellors who were taken out of non-DEIS schools. DEIS schools retained them. DEIS schools have had some additional advantage through this roll out. DEIS schools are improving their resources while non-DEIS schools are seeing a restoration.

Very clear best practice is being evolved here. We have specifically piloted student support teams that look at the sort of structures and policies that can make the maximum impact. They have been piloted and are being evaluated. The indication is it is a very positive programme that has been developed. Each school will have year head structures, guidance counsellor led plans, mixtures of whole class, group class and one-to-one interventions. NEPS is supporting this pilot student support team approach within schools which we feel in the long term is the right strategy. We are now undertaking not just an evaluation of these pilot schemes but a survey of how we are deploying within that guidance counselling plan to see if we are getting the very best impact.

The Department has a range of support programmes to strengthen the capacity of teachers within the system to deal with the challenges in well-being. These include a six-year incredible years programme, which is aimed at teachers and helping them to manage within the classroom. There is a two-day friends programme on pupil resilience. There are anti-bullying strategies and every school must have an anti-bullying policy in place.We are also deploying our inspectorate, which is looking at how to evaluate policies that are successful in the context of well-being within our schools. It is working with 28 schools on a pilot basis to seek to develop the indicators of success in this area. It is not seeking to impose from outside some externally created framework, but is working with schools on the ground to allow us to measure progress in this area.

The other huge initiative we are making this year is to roll out at junior cycle level for the first time a new well-being curriculum. At the moment it is being structured within each school and each school has had to develop its programme. The programme works off the core SPHE programmes but it also integrates those and adds additional curriculum content. The NCCA has issued guidelines, which have been very popular with schools in terms of how to do this. Importantly, it also emphasised the well-being of teachers if they are to be successful in delivering these programmes. Again, a lot of time has gone into CPD, as they call it in the jargon - the continuous professional development and upskilling of teachers to manage these new programmes. This represents a significant shift. The idea is that student support should have three levels of intervention. Every child should get intervention of a certain sort and there are many programmes around that. Some are appropriate at group level, some individual interventions are needed and there is also capacity and knowledge in regard to the range of services to which students should be referred.

This debate is an opportunity to hear back from Senators, who have immense experience in this area, so I will finish my contribution shortly. I should mention that my Department is a member of the youth mental health task force and we have been involved in the pathfinder project that was identified by Government. The mental health of young people is a crucial cross-Government area where the Government needs to become smarter at working across the traditional silos. We are very involved in the development of the youth mental health task force. We see a lot of what is being done as a really important contribution to a mental health strategy. By working together, not only can we ensure that better connections are built, both at local and national level, but we can learn from the expertise of other fields and bring them into the work we do with schools and colleges.

That gives a bird's eye view of the elements that are out there at the moment and that are in development. We have committed to a 25% increase in the National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, which is a very important support service; we have just established the national centre of excellence of support for special educational needs and I am currently looking at the whole area of leadership and professional development to ascertain whether what we are now doing is best practice in this context. It is spread across a lot of different support bodies, including 30 or 31 local teacher education centres, as well as certain national centres of excellence. There have been criticisms as to whether it has sufficient coherence and direction and that is something I hope to evaluate in the course of the coming year with key stakeholders.

We want to make sure we are empowering both teachers and leaders, who are the most influential in any school in having an impact on a child's experience, in order to make sure we apply best practice in the way in which we develop their skills. We spend approximately 3% of payroll in this area generally but we need to make sure that 3% of payroll is getting the impact we would like and allowing for leadership. In any part of this sphere and with any of these initiatives, unless there is good leadership within the school, one will not get the level of outcome. I am convinced that, whether it be well-being, mathematics or any of the other areas in which we have ambition, unless we equip the teachers and the leaders in the school with the capacity and the professionalism and the support to do their job, be innovative and encourage innovation, we will not get the outcomes.

It is a shift to some degree in the way we think about schools. We are very centralised in the way we think about schools and it is very much an input-output model, with rigidly defined lines. We are only starting to see the role of the partner as increasingly empowering those who are working within our schools to do things differently and better, and with better impact, both learning from their own doing and sharing that learning. I see this whole area of leadership and CPD as crucial to the success of the other initiatives we are putting in place in the well-being area. I look forward to the contribution of Senators.