Tom Clonan (Independent)

I thank the Minister of State for attending this morning to hear this Commencement matter. A new professional doctorate in educational psychology will commence in September and the Government has very generously made available a bursary of €40,000 per student at taxpayers' expense. I do not know if it is generally understood in Cabinet that this course will only qualify its graduates to work with the National Educational Psychology Service, NEPS. It an excellent service. It is very well managed and has no wait lists. However, the course will not qualify its graduates to work with the 400 HSE primary care teams throughout the State or with our 91 children’s disability network teams. None of the graduates of this course will be able to work with the 90 child and adolescent mental health services teams in the country, to work with the section 38 or section 39 care providers or to work with Tusla. That is an extraordinary waste of taxpayers' money. Similar doctoral programmes in educational psychology, such as the ones run in the University of Limerick, UCD and Queen's University Belfast, qualify their graduates to work in all those settings and NEPS. The course in Maynooth is an outlier in its course design. It is very narrow in its scope. Having spent 22 years in the academic setting designing courses and supervising students to PhD and at postdoctoral level, I know it would take the course design team maybe one or two meetings to change the design ever so slightly so that its graduates could address the very pressing needs in all those other care settings.

The Minister of State will be aware that in our primary care teams there are children waiting up to nine years for a psychological intervention. Throughout the country, there will be 25,000 children waiting on an assessment of need that can be carried out by an educational psychologist were they to be properly qualified. This is countrywide. For example, in Dublin north city and west, there are 2,816 children waiting to see an educational psychologist, while Cavan-Monaghan has 3,550 and Louth-Meath 1,447. For each one of those children, there is also a family. In many cases they are waiting two, three or four years to see an educational psychologist. We know we face a very significant recruitment and retention challenge for psychologists, physiotherapists and speech and language therapists. I welcome this development – it is a great initiative – but for the want of a little change in the course design, graduates will only be able to work with NEPs. It is an excellent service but it is already well resourced. It does not have waiting lists. In the areas of most acute need in our communities, in CAMHS and in the primary healthcare areas, none of its graduates will be able to work. It is an anomaly in that the similar courses run in UCD, Queens and UL qualify their graduates to work everywhere. I hope someone can speak to the president of Maynooth University and get that little change put in place to benefit us all.