Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for stepping in today. This is a Commencement matter on education addressed to the Minister for Education, Deputy Foley. I hope the Minister of State can relay my messages back to her. We need more psychologists in the HSE. We need them working in schools, in primary care, in child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, and on our children's disability network teams. I very much welcome the decision to pilot in-house mental health counselling for primary school pupils, amounting to €5 million in the budget. It is something for which I had called. We need it in our secondary schools too.

I am asking the Minister, through the Minister of State, who they are going to employ to take on these roles. There are 9,500 children waiting on primary care psychology services - an overwhelming number. Without early intervention, mild mental health issues grow, leading to bigger problems. This can be avoided with the right support and treatment. There are not enough psychologists in our children's disability network teams for our special schools. We do not have enough national educational psychologists in the National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, or therapists in mainstream or special classes. It is acutely felt by children with autism and special needs and by their families. That is the situation at the moment before we also start to recruit for general mental health support in schools, which as I said is very positive.

I mention also that there is no mandatory training for teachers for autism in mainstream classrooms to ensure teachers are equipped to respond to the needs of children as well. It is great we are launching pilot programmes like this, that we have committed to reinstating therapists in special schools, and that we are opening buildings in our communities for children's disability network teams, CDNTs.It is great that money was allocated in the budget that we have never seen before but if we are not fixing the problem of actual recruitment and places, then we are prolonging the problem and the pain for families. Something the Government and the Department of Education have done in this budget, to address some of the inequity around trainee psychologist doctorate programmes, was to enable counselling psychologists to access the same amount of funding and the same salary as clinical psychologists. That is good news, but educational psychologists have been left out. Why have they been left out?

I will give some figures I received from somebody who wrote to me this week and I have been dealing with this issue for a long time now. This is someone who is doing the education and child psychology doctorate at Mary Immaculate College. She has already spent €30,000 training to get to this point in her career. She is paying €10,000 in fees and is working for 330 days unpaid. Her counterpart in the clinical psychologist course gets a salary of €40,497 and 60% of her fees are covered. As part of their doctorates, these people will be based in the HSE's children's disability services, in the National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, in the child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, and in the primary care psychology service. Post-qualification they will be qualified to work in any of those areas. Why do they not have access to the same funding to pay the extortionate cost when they dedicate their lives to children and educational psychology? Not only do they deserve to be paid the same, they need to be valued for what they are doing and that is part of the reason they will work in the HSE.