Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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310. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if funding is available for schools to provide art therapy to pupils in an effort to help them deal with bereavement as a result of road traffic accidents; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [45771/17]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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I might inform you that my Department’s National Educational Psychological Service (NEPS) provides guidelines and resource materials for schools to enable them to deal with certain traumatic events which can adversely affect pupils and school staff. The guidelines "Responding to Critical Incidents: Guidelines for Schools" refer to preventive approaches that schools can adopt in creating a safe and supportive environment. It also outlines how schools can plan for and respond to crises.

 The publication provides practical step-by-step guidelines for teachers and principals on how to respond when a tragedy occurs. It offers support to schools at a potentially overwhelming time.

The guidelines focus upon alerting schools to planning processes, structures and actions which will better allow them to cope with a traumatic incidents such as suicide or suspected suicide, murder, accidental death including road traffic accidents and drowning, and death through illness of members of the school community. In relation to suicide, advice is also given on prevention and positive mental health stratagems and approaches.

NEPS psychologists will also, at the specific invitation of school authorities, attend at the schools immediately following such incidents to offer direct advice and assistance to school staff.

The overall emphasis is to produce a calming and reassuring response to the student body, to lessen understandable anxiety to return the schools to normality as soon as possible and to heighten vigilance among staff, parents and where appropriate students to situations where individual pupils are at risk.  Such individuals may be subject to referral to outside clinical services along the pathways advised to the school within this process.

While art therapy may form an appropriate part of a multi-disciplinary response by services, this would be in a clinical context rather than as a school-based response.