I am delighted to open the 11th public meeting of the joint committee. Today we will focus on supporting teachers in youth drugs education and prevention in schools. We are joined by Mr. John Conneely, assistant general secretary, education and research and Mr. Richard Bell, president, Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland, ASTI; Mr. David Duffy, education and research officer and Mr. Anthony Quinn, president, Teachers Union of Ireland, TUI; and Mr. John Boyle, general secretary and Ms Anne Horan, president, Irish National Teachers Organisation, INTO. All of our witnesses are very welcome.

Before we begin, I must read a note on privilege. All witnesses and members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice to the effect that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks and it is imperative that they comply with any such direction. I remind members of the constitutional requirement that in order to participate in public meetings they must be physically present within the confines of the place where Parliament has chosen to sit. Members of the committee attending remotely must do so from within the precincts of Leinster House. In this regard, I ask members taking part via MS Teams to confirm that they are on the grounds of the Leinster House complex before making a contribution to the meeting.

All opening statements have been circulated to members and will be published on the Oireachtas website following this session. As agreed, we will limit each opening statement to five minutes to allow plenty of time for questions. I am conscious that a wide range of issues will be discussed here today. If necessary, further and more detailed information can be sent to the clerk to the committee for circulation to members. Witnesses should note that due to other parliamentary commitments, members may be in and out of the committee room during the meeting. They should not read anything more into that.

I invite Mr. Conneely to deliver his opening statement.

I thank the Cathaoirleach. As Ireland's main second level teaching union representing 21,000 teachers and principals, ASTI welcomes the chance to speak with the committee today about drug use among young people. Every day teachers see how this issue affects students' well-being, learning and family life. Our submission reflects what teachers experience in classrooms and school communities and includes the findings of national research, including the Citizen's Assembly on Drugs Use and the Growing Up in Ireland study.

Schools play an important role in education and prevention. However, drug use is linked to wider social and personal challenges, including mental health, family pressures, disadvantage and community factors. Schools cannot take on responsibilities that properly belong to health, youth and social services. A coordinated system-wide response is needed. It is important to understand the pressures faced by young people. The Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use describes drug use in Irish society as wide-ranging, complex and multifaceted. It highlights the fact that vulnerable and disadvantaged young people face greater risks and that stigma often stops young people from seeking help early. Teachers see this complexity every day. Warning signs like withdrawal from friends, falling motivation, tiredness, rising anxiety or lack of concentration, often appear long before any confirmed substance use. Many students experiencing difficulties with drugs are already dealing with emotional strain, conflict at home or unmet mental-health needs. The Growing Up in Ireland study shows the scale of the issue. By age 17 to 18, 30% have tried cannabis, 90% have consumed alcohol and a smaller but notable minority have tried substances such as cocaine or ecstasy. These behaviours rarely emerge suddenly. Growing Up in Ireland findings show that children who struggle academically, socially or emotionally at age nine to 13 are much more likely to engage in risky behaviours at age 17 to 18. Drug use is often the result of difficulties that began years earlier. Inequality is also a major factor. Young people in lower-income households report poorer health, more chronic illness and higher exposure to risk. Teachers witness the effect of these disadvantages every day.

In terms of the role of schools, ASTI supports the provision of social, personal and health education, SPHE and relationships and sexuality education, RSE. The updated curriculum for junior and senior cycle aims to develop resilience, emotional understanding, decision-making and relationship skills, all of which contribute to prevention and well-being. However, SPHE is compulsory for schools to provide but not for all students to take and this creates difficulties with timetabling and continuity. Effective SPHE delivery requires adequate teacher training, but much of the currently available CPD is short term and insufficient for the complexity of modern well-being education.

Access to specialist supports is an even greater challenge. The Oireachtas report on mental health services highlights long waiting lists for psychological assessment, inconsistent access to counselling and major regional variation in supports. Teachers are deeply committed professionals, but they cannot take on the roles of counsellors, therapists, social workers and addiction specialists in addition to teaching. Prevention and early intervention require strong, accessible mental health and community services, not simply additional pressure on schools.

The ASTI view on a realistic national strategy is that it should include restored and expanded guidance counselling including guaranteed one-to-one support; meaningful investment in teacher professional development delivered during the school day; improved mental health, family support and youth services ensuring timely referrals and early intervention; reliable inter-agency co-operation, enabling schools and health professionals to work together; lower pupil-teacher ratios and stronger pastoral systems, allowing early identification of difficulties; and clear, consistent substance use policies aligned with Department guidelines and developed with input from staff, parents and students. Prevention is not a single lesson or programme; it is a long-term collaborative effort requiring adequate levels of staffing, clear policy and accessible supports. Young people deserve a response to drug use that is understanding, evidence-based and realistic. Schools play a central role but they cannot solve this issue alone. We need proper resourcing and investment and a strong partnership with health and community services and respect for teachers' professional role. In order to build a meaningful preventative system, we need a system that will meaningfully protect and support students. I thank members for the opportunity to present to this committee. We welcome any questions.

The TUI thanks the committee for this opportunity to make a submission on the topic of supporting teachers in youth drug education and prevention in schools. The TUI represents teachers and school leaders in post-primary schools as well as staff working in further and higher education settings, such as Youthreach, and in the institute of technology, IOT, and technological university, TU, sectors. The TUI welcomes the provision of drug prevention education and mandatory social, personal and health education, SPHE, in schools. Schools and other education settings are a safe place and have a role in preventing substance misuse whether that substance be alcohol, smoking, including vaping, and-or illicit drugs. However, it is important to note that schools are not health service therapy centres, Garda stations or rehab centres. Schools can only work in partnership with other agencies and with society as a whole.

Schools have a responsibility for delivering the SPHE programme but, in the broader societal context, parents and guardians and families clearly have the primary responsibility in terms of fostering values and practises in relation to drug prevention that are positive and are underpinned by respect for oneself and for others. Indeed, Article 42 of the Constitution cites the family unit as the primary educator. It is very difficult for schools to counter youth drug use, especially when it occurs in the context of intergenerational drug use in the family home. It is important to note that drug use and misuse is not confined to any individual community or school type. Regrettably, it is far more widespread than that.

Schools need to be able to decide which teachers are best suited to teaching sensitive matters such as drug use and misuse. Teachers must be able to access high-quality continuing professional development, CPD, to enable them to carry out this sensitive and important task. The Department of Education and Youth has a responsibility to provide this CPD at a time and venue that is convenient to teachers. The TUI notes the information provided by the Department of Education and Youth to this committee on 26 November of this year that over 2,000 teachers have been able to avail of CPD in this area within the last year. The TUI strongly welcomes this CPD provision. However, the TUI would like to highlight that there are over 75,000 teachers in primary and post-primary schools in Ireland today. The TUI suggests that we may need to scale up the provision of CPD in this area. It is also important that CPD be available to staff working in non-school settings such as Youthreach, for example.

The curriculum is an important driver and a powerful driver in terms of youth drug prevention. The SPHE programme addresses a range of issues relevant to this topic but most pertinently drugs, alcohol, smoking, peer pressure and youth self-esteem. Education, prevention and awareness are important issues for schools. We must also note that while provision of SPHE is mandatory in schools, it is not mandatory for students to participate in the programme. Parents may choose to withdraw their child from the programme, thereby denying the child the opportunity to study the material as well as creating potentially significant timetabling challenges for the school.

In relation to non-school settings, especially further education and training, FET, settings, the TUI would like to note the submission to this committee by the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science on 26 November that outlined how short-term FET programmes, often provided by private providers, can present challenges in terms of providing a wider education including drug prevention, as opposed to, if I may say, clocking up the credits.

The TUI is also aware of reports that some materials and-or speakers being used to support the provision of SPHE in some schools may not be in line with best practise of independence and the provision on non-directive expert knowledge. The TUI believes that it can be useful for schools to use outside materials and-or speakers to provide particular parts of the SPHE programme. However, it is important that schools are confident that the materials and-or speakers are in line with best practise and that particular agendas are not being pushed by the materials or by the speaker. It would be helpful to schools if the Department of education could develop or at least co-ordinate the development of additional resources that schools could then have confidence in using.

As noted in the Department of Education and Youth and Central Statistics Office, CSO, data, student numbers in post-primary alone rose by 84,000 between 2006 and 2023. Full-time student numbers in higher education rose by 46,000 in the same period. That is a combined increase of over 100,000 students. Unfortunately, as noted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, in terms of percentage of GDP, Ireland spends less than half the OECD average on secondary education and only slightly over half on tertiary education.

In conclusion, schools and other education settings are doing an excellent job in early prevention. Schools have an important role to play in the area of drug prevention and education, but responsibilities also rest with others. The great American educationalist Larry Cuban once said, "When society gets an itch, schools get scratched". The TUI would like to make the following recommendations to committee: all schools should have access to home school community liaisons, HSCLs, not just DEIS schools; there should be additional provision of guidance teachers to all schools; members of student support teams need ring-fenced time to carry out the prevention work; there need to be more pastoral supports in schools, especially year head positions; and CPD should be available to all education staff in the post-primary and Youthreach systems and not just to a small number of staff. I would be happy to answer any questions the committee may have. I thank members.

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach, le Teachtaí agus le Seanadóirí as an deis labhairt leo inniu. The INTO welcomes the opportunity to present our statement on school-based drugs prevention at primary level. As the oldest and largest teachers' union in Ireland, representing 54,000 members across the island, we have long advocated for the health and safety and well-being of our pupils. While the majority of primary age children, thankfully, are not directly involved in drug or alcohol abuse, it is clear that early, age-appropriate prevention and well-being supports can reduce future risk to enable pupils to develop the knowledge and confidence they need to make safe and healthy choices. The INTO and our members understand this and remain steadfast proponents of evidence-informed substance use prevention education in our primary schools. However, schools cannot be expected to deliver high-quality prevention and well-being programmes in the absence of adequate resources and appropriate external services. Effective prevention requires clear national policy, adequate staffing, sufficient resources, sustained professional learning and access to external health and community supports. It must also respect the realities of teachers' workloads and the complex needs of the pupils in today's classrooms.

Substance use prevention education in primary schools is currently delivered through SPHE, supported by the Walk Tall programme, the Department and Education and Youth's recommended resource for promoting healthy choices and personal safety.

Walk Tall was originally developed in 1996, and in 2024 the HSE noted that it remains broadly aligned with international evidence on effective school-based prevention, being skills focused and developmentally sequenced.

However, Walk Tall predates the redeveloped curriculum and does not fully align with the new learning outcomes under the well-being specification. This committee should, therefore, recommend that Walk Tall be revised without delay to bring it into full alignment with the redeveloped curriculum and to ensure that teachers have a contemporary and well-resourced and structured programme to deliver, with materials that reflect current realities. It is ten years since this programme was reviewed and the revised curriculum is out of kilter with it.

In practice, primary schools deliver prevention education conscientiously, but face systemic pressures including limited time, little access to quality training and increasing complexity in pupils' lived experiences. The forthcoming curriculum provides a timely opportunity to update resources, strengthen teacher support and ensure schools are equipped to support pupils with a realistic and well-resourced framework. Without this scaffolding, the curriculum will have little impact.

International research is clear that drug prevention programmes are only effective when specific conditions are in place. Successful programmes require adequate instructional time, structured and sequenced lessons, and opportunities for pupils to learn skills actively rather than passively. They require teachers who feel confident and supported, and who are given the professional space to work with colleagues on planning and implementation. They also require support for school leaders, a whole-school approach, a positive school climate and access to specialist therapeutic services.

At present, schools are facing a scale of change that is unprecedented. The coming years will see the enactment of the redeveloped primary curriculum, the introduction of the new DEIS plan which we very much welcome, training linked to new child protection procedures, the revised code of behaviour, guidelines for addressing behaviours of concern in crisis situations and NCSE’s Relate - I could go on with this list. These programmes are arriving at a pace that schools cannot cope with and the cumulative effect is clear. Schools are stretched to capacity, with many principals and teachers reporting that they are now at breaking point. Alongside these changes, schools are managing an ever-increasing workload related to pupils with additional needs, most of whom are included in the largest classes in Europe. Any programme that is simply added to an overloaded system is unlikely to achieve the outcomes that national policy intends.

Teachers value SPHE and well-being education, but struggle to give it the time and attention it deserves because of competing pressures. Without appropriate planning time and manageable class sizes, the redeveloped curriculum and its strategies to address substance misuse cannot be delivered.

The INTO has previously called for the provision of six non-pupil-contact days each year to enable the Department to provide training for school staff and to allow staff to plan for the implementation of initiatives. This remains a necessary and urgent measure. When one considers the investment that the Department put in to the previous curriculum where we got these six days, it got 27 years out of that investment and it served the school communities very well. We need that to be repeated.

Schools cannot be expected to do this work alone. Drug prevention education, like all well-being and safeguarding work, cannot be separated from the broader society within which children live. Cross-departmental co-operation is needed, particularly between the Department of education, the Department of Health and the Department of Children, Disability and Equality. Policy alignment, shared planning and joined-up delivery are essential conditions for supporting children, parents, teachers and principals.

Early intervention is critical. When children receive timely therapeutic counselling and social supports, the risks associated with later substance misuse are significantly reduced, yet children face long waiting lists for assessments, limited access to mental health services, insufficient family support provision and inconsistent engagement from community agencies. Without access to these services, teachers can only do so much. Our teachers are not social workers, counsellors or therapists, yet they are increasingly expected to carry responsibilities that ought to be the remit of health and social care practitioners.

The INTO recognises the importance of effective substance-use prevention education in primary school education. Our members remain committed to the welfare and education of the pupils in their care, but they cannot deliver this work without the time, training, resources and inter-agency support that we have identified as essential.

Our president, Anne Horan, and I are quite happy to take any questions from committee members. Go raibh míle maith agaibh.

I thank our guests for their presentations and also for the work that their organisations and the teachers that they give support to are doing within schools, whether primary or secondary school, and also in third level.

Mr. Duffy made the point that there is only so much schools can do and it really falls back to the parents. In relation to schools trying to develop a programme, is there a need for the involvement of parents as well? How would Mr. Duffy develop that out? Who else is there providing the information or the support to parents? Does there need to be better connectivity? If you have that, obviously schools will require that support in order to engage with the parents as well. I am wondering about Mr. Duffy's experience of schools around the country. Different schools do different things but some schools are very proactive as regards working with parents because it is the only way they can deal with this issue. What is Mr. Duffy's own experience or the experience of his members on this issue?

I thank the Deputy for the question. It is a really important one. We feel strongly that it is important for all the aspects of the community to work closely together, that is, the school, the community centre and the local sports organisation. It could include the local community drugs task force, etc. My particular expertise is at school level. It is really important that schools work with parents, and they do.

It is also important to note this is not unique to any individual community or type of school. Sadly, this is quite widespread in terms of the issue of not only illicit drugs but also smoking, vaping, alcohol misuse, etc.

From a school point of view, what schools need most of all is additional home-school liaison officers and additional guidance counsellors because, in terms of prevention work, HSCLs are a vital link with the local community, and particularly with parents and guardians. In relation to triaging issues where they arises, guidance counsellors are an important step.

It is important to say, as all contributors thus far have said, it is not the case that schools can solve all the problems. We have a range of expertise but we do not have expertise in, for example, the medical end of things which may be relevant as well. What is important is that those additional supports be provided to all schools, not just some.

The number of SNAs that we now have in schools, particularly in primary schools, compared with what we had ten or 15 years ago has totally changed. There was a mindset within the Department and within schools to try to deal with particular issues they had with children who needed additional support. Now this is a very important issue. Should we not be doing something likewise in relation to the point Mr. Duffy is making that schools need that additional support where they are working more with parents and with the students together but need additional staff to deal with that?

I am conscious that there have been a lot of hands up for this. To interject politely is a life skill so just jump in there if you want.

Parental involvement is so important. Often the parents who do not engage are the parents who should be engaging. We cannot deny that many of our children are living in an environment where drug abuse is present, either as an addiction or for recreational use. This is where Walk Tall is very important in our primary schools. It will, when redeveloped, provide a spiral age-appropriate curriculum that could be built on as the children get older. It should be redeveloped.

As stated in our submission, we are asking the committee to look for the redevelopment of Walk Tall as a matter of urgency.

Deputy Burke asked about parental involvement. Currently, a lot of a schools throughout the country have a school completion programme that sits parallel to the daily teaching. Those school completion units are a facility set up by Tusla. They work with both the student population on a kind of non-educational premise and try to build and link in courses that integrate parents into the school environment and act as a bridge. That programme is not in every single school and is by no means widespread. Where it is in place, however, it is very effective in bringing the community outside into the school.

I accept that is the case in some places. In parts of my constituency, there are parents who are extremely supportive, in fairness. There are some parents who opt out, however, and it is then more difficult for the schools to introduce any kind of programme involving a joint approach. That is one of the challenges facing schools.

There are different levels of parental involvement. In the first instance, it is really critical that parents are involved at a national level, including, for example, by working with the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, NCCA. Parents have a strong role to play there, along with all the other stakeholders, in designing curriculums. We had an initiative a number of years ago with the National Parents Council, NPP, where we held a conference to discuss counselling supports for children in a school setting. It was the first conference of its kind and we had guest speakers from south-west England, where a similar scheme was running really well. On foot of that, we included the establishment of such a scheme as a priority in our pre-budget submission that year. We were sort of surprised that the Government decided to run with it immediately. It is only at pilot stage but it goes to show that when the NPC and INTO work closely together, a scheme like that can be rolled out. It was a new beginning from the Department of education. What we learned from it is that perhaps it is time for the Department to take responsibility directly for the supports going into schools, rather than being over-reliant on other Departments, particularly those that have failed miserably for decades to deliver those supports. We built on that and had a level of support then for a few other initiatives the Government introduced afterwards. We welcome that the Department of Education and Youth recently recruited 41 therapists directly. Parental involvement is important at a macro level.

Moving then to the school level, as our colleagues have said, we expect to call loudly at our annual conference this year for a major extension of the home school liaison initiative. When I was a home school liaison co-ordinator in a large Dublin DEIS band 1 school, I was very impressed by the then North Western Health Board's stand-alone drugs prevention programme. All the other health boards were doing their own thing at the time. I was very proud to introduce that programme to the local community in south Dublin, with which the teachers worked very closely.

It is important that other agencies and Departments link in and provide all the supports that are needed. However, from the primary level perspective, the biggest gap at the moment is that the Walk Tall programme is ten years out of date. The second gap with that programme, and it has been a long gap, is that there has not been training for teachers in the programme.

We are a little over time, and I am conscious that Mr. Conneely has been very politely trying to get in. I will allow him in and then we might move on.

Deputy Burke asked about how parents can be involved. There is an opportunity when a school is developing its substance abuse policies to survey and interact with parents to make them aware of the policies. I am sure that is being done in a lot of schools. Fundamentally, however, the problem with drugs is, as we know, that it is an increasing problem that is quite complex and multifaceted. Deputy Burke mentioned bringing in additional supports, etc. We need to link in with health professionals. Teachers, as noted, are not health professionals but we have guidance counsellors in schools who are trained in this area. This is an area in which we can meaningfully interact. If we want to make improvements, it is an area we need to look at. Ring-fencing the number of guidance counsellors would be a very important and meaningful action we could take in this regard. Currently, guidance counsellors are required to do a lot of other things and student numbers have increased. This needs to be looked at and it is something we could do easily.

Cuirim fáilte roimh gach duine anseo. Tá an-áthas orm an t-ábhar seo a phlé leo. My question has already been answered to some degree in that what is needed is a greater level of counselling, psychological services and home school liaison. We all know the right terms to use, including early intervention and inter-agency and cross-departmental co-operation, but we do not always see a lot of that. When my dad was principal of St. Joseph's school in Muirhevnamore, there was really good home school liaison, a really good connection with the community, the school completion programme and the Springboard initiative, which, at that stage, dealt specifically with families in Muirhevnamore. There was just a greater level of resources, with people like Alice Malone doing huge work.

Mr. Tiernan O'Neill, principal of Corpus Christi Primary School in Moyross, spoke at the disability committee about the additional services available in his school. Our focus at that committee, obviously, was on the therapists, but he also spoke about the work of psychologists in the context of the feuds in Limerick. Services were needed for children who were dealing with the day-in-day-out trauma of what was going on at that particular time. We all agree that schools cannot be the solution to the drug addiction problem through intergenerational trauma but we have seen that they can be a base for addressing it. However, that can only be done if there are sufficient supports. We all know the issues that exist in primary and secondary schools in terms of keeping the wolf from the door, never mind anything else.

Will the witnesses list, in five minutes, what the system and services we need would look like for them? We need to talk turkey on this issue.

We have had quite a bit of conversation around the external agencies and the supports we can obtain. There is also the question of what can be done internally in schools. During austerity times, posts of responsibility were stripped out of our schools. We are in a scenario where, previously, 52% of teachers would have had posts of responsibility but that figure is now sitting slightly north of 30%. We are acutely aware of the notion of the one good adult. The number of posts of responsibility in our schools are not back up to a sufficient level. We have a distinct lack of year heads, who usually act as a fulcrum for students coming in and presenting with problems. They are the go-to people. We certainly need more of them in schools. In addition, continuing professional development, CPD, training for teachers is absolutely a mandatory requirement. Teachers need the repertoire of skills to be able to deal with these issues. We ask that the committee make a recommendation to the Department of Education and Youth that training and enhancement in terms of the allocation of posts of responsibility is a must.

I endorse that proposal. A good few of the members present would be familiar with a particular programme. I do not refer to the Springboard programme, as mentioned by Deputy Ó Murchú, which is also a brilliant programme, but to the excellent City Connects programme in the Cathaoirleach's constituency. When we were making our submissions to the Department of Education and Youth over the past three years in regard to a DEIS plus scheme, we were very much impressed with City Connects.

Unfortunately, the announcement of DEIS plus has been delayed for a number of months due to the change in Minister. When it is announced, we want to ensure there is a trauma scheme in the 100 or so primary and post-primary schools in the most disadvantaged communities. There should be additional resources, and the focus should not be all about the academic standards that the children involved achieve. It should be more focused on dealing with intergenerational trauma. I was glad to hear Deputy Ó Murchú mention that this was the situation in his father's school in Dundalk.

Unfortunately, beyond these areas, drugs are a scourge in many small rural communities and in urban communities which have been neglected for so long. In terms of some of the supports required, as a union, we feel that there are sufficient models of support in the system. The problem is that they are languishing below the levels they should be at. This is with regard to posts of responsibility, the home school liaison scheme and the various pilot schemes, some of which have been running for 20-odd years. The Early Start programme is a great early intervention programme in primary schools. A big review of the DEIS programme will be required. We do not need to reinvent the wheel with this. We just need to give additional resources to the programmes that are already there to enable teachers to do their best and ensure they, SNAs and school communities can address this issue in the longer term.

To do anything meaningful in schools, we need capacity. There is a problem with capacity in schools at the moment. Schools are under threat in many ways. Something we can look at is restoring the pupil-teacher ratio to the level it used to be. It is very high at present. That needs to be addressed. Senior cycle reform and a whole load of other things are coming, and this needs to be addressed. Restored and expanded guidance counselling has been mentioned. The problem has increased and it is not the same as it used to be. This would be very important.

We also need to look at the socioeconomic issues that are behind all of this. It is not only a school-based issue. We need to look at the inequalities that lead to this. The disadvantage in communities generally needs to be looked at. This is a long-term issue, but it is very important. It is linked to the drug problem, and it is something that we need to look at as a country. In terms of inter-agency support, it is very important that schools have access to health professionals. The capacity in the system does not seem to be there. These professionals do not seem to exist as far as I am aware and there is difficulty in recruiting them. We need major efforts to address this serious problem. We need to do something meaningful in this area.

The Citizens' Assembly on Drugs Use clearly mentioned that it wanted a comprehensive evidence-based health-led approach to drugs education in Irish schools. We strongly wish to be involved in this. People ask what it will come down to and, sadly, it will come down to investment, staffing and policy changing on guidance counsellors, as Mr. Boyle mentioned earlier. If we take, for example, SPHE classes, which are a vehicle to deal with these topics, they could be an effective vehicle but not if there are 26 kids in the room. If we are going to try to talk about evidence-based teaching in a room containing 26 kids, if an issue comes up, it cannot be dealt with in a group that size. If we are going to implement SPHE, we can tick a box and say we have done so, and I can sit in front of a class and speak about the dangers of drugs, but I cannot have a conversation with students on their experiences because it would be impossible in a class that size. In fact, it would be quite dangerous.

Sometimes, bad advice is worse than no advice. We cannot have a situation where we have teachers in classrooms who are not completely educated when it comes to drug use and drugs. This training must be continuous. It must be upgraded all the time. It is not enough to say we will do it once and the box is ticked. Deputy Burke asked about parents. The problem we have, and I know it has already been mentioned, is that the parents we need to speak to tend to be the ones who do not engage with us. We have a lot of problems. To solve these problems, we will have to invest. If we want to do it, we have to invest.

This is not the only issue we have to deal with in schools. Schools have become a panacea for all things. Mr. Duffy said when somebody itches, the schools scratch. This is the reality in every way. If we are going to be serious about implementing this policy, and if this is going to work, then we need smaller class sizes, really good effective and clear training, and we need access to people who have expertise, be it guidance counsellors or people in our communities.

I thank the witnesses for being here. Prevention is always better than cure. The witnesses are correct that schools are the panacea. Society itches and the schools scratch, and this point is well made. After family units, the school community, including teachers, is the second most important relationship in every young person's life. If young people in these settings can be responded to in a meaningful way that meets their needs, the power and the payback not only for the young person and their family but for society is enormous.

The big issue I hear about is capacity. There are capacity constraints, time constraints and resource issues. One of the witnesses called out the statistic that the Department gave to us, which is that 2,000 teachers avail of CPD. This is out of 75,000 or more teachers. I am embarrassed for them to give us that statistic. By any standard, in terms of workforce management, it is a very poor indicator. I would really appreciate it if the witnesses could share what are the practical barriers for teachers who, let us face it, have dedicated their lives to knowledge, sharing knowledge and being educators. What is preventing them from availing of CPD in practical terms? We need to go back and share this with the Department. I am not dismissing all of the other very valuable suggestions that have been made on home-school liaison officers and counselling, and I do not want to dismiss the incredibly valuable work being done by City Connects and other programmes, but we have 75,000 very talented, dedicated and educated adults engaging with young people every day. We need to resource them, and we need to enable them to avail of CPD. Will the witnesses state what needs to change in their daily lives and work practices to make this a possibility? Will they also provide an indication as to what would be a decent statistic in terms of workforce management?

There are 910 hours of tuition time in primary school, which is one of the highest levels in the OECD. In every other jurisdiction time for staff development is built in. We do not have that in Ireland. This is the first year since the foundation of the State that staff in schools got training on child protection.

I do not know if the Senator is aware of that. This is the first year in over 100 years that the staff - SNAs, secretaries, caretakers and teachers - got child protection training.

In regard to the training we require for this programme, the Walk Tall programme has been in existence for a good length of time now. The training was always done in teachers' own private time. That is how that scheme was rolled out. It was usually ten Wednesdays for two hours. You would finish school at 3 p.m. and get home after 6 p.m. When that programme was rolled out in the school where we prioritised it as a programme, every single member of staff attended the training for the ten Wednesdays and they were given two extra personal vacation, EPV, days in exchange for giving up their 20 hours - two days they could use as personal days for family events and so on later in the year. The Senator is talking about that statistic. In my view, if the Government was serious about that Walk Tall programme, it would provide that training within the school year for every teacher, SNA and staff member together. It is fantastic for the postholder we mentioned to be the co-ordinator for the programme but one teacher cannot co-ordinate everything that is going on in the school properly. Everybody has to be getting the same message. I would ask that members recommend that a day or two days in the school year be set aside for all the teachers of Ireland and SNAs to have training on the Walk Tall programme. That would be a good starting point for the discourse from today.

I thank the Senator for the question. It was very astute and relevant to what we are trying to achieve here. To some extent, it is an element of the urgent crowding out the important. There is really important CPD happening in the area of SPHE, for example. There is certainly not enough of it but it is happening. However, it gets crowded out by the more immediate issues, which are very important issues, of CPD, for example, for curricular change. We are obviously seeing quite a lot of that, both in the primary and post-primary sectors at the moment, so that is important.

What is important to note is that not every teacher needs the same level of training. Some teachers in the school will have to be trained to a very high level and will almost be subject specialists in the area of, for example, SPHE. The training needed by HSCLs and guidance counsellors is going to be at a particular level but all teachers need some level of training. They do not necessarily have to be experts in every area but they need some level.

In regard to the capacity constraints, a lot of it boils down to every school wanting it to happen in a two- or three-day block at the start of a year, at the end of a term or at the start of the next term. In fairness to the CPD providers, it is not possible for them to reach every school on those particular, for example, three days. What is really important is that we make a level of CPD available to every teacher so that they see themselves as a teacher rather than necessarily a teacher of geography, French or history, to pick three for example. It is about those sorts of issues , that is, around the time and the days being available and about this being blocked as something important, so we do not always end up with a situation of what is urgent crowding out of what is an important matter in itself.

From a practical point of view, there are problems with capacity in schools. There are many initiatives coming in at the minute, such as senior cycle redevelopment, etc., or training things going on. There is a problem with teacher recruitment and retention. If you want to go out for a day, there is a problem with somebody replacing you. It can be difficult for schools to get a replacement. The capacity of schools to do this and to be able to sustain this is very important. On CPD itself, we need to be careful that we do not look at CPD as becoming the solution for this. It is a very important part of it but all of this needs to be supported by health professionals as well. The early picking up of the problem in schools needs to be supported by health professionals as well. CPD is very important but it needs to be supported by health professionals. With the capacity of schools at the minute, it is not really that sustainable to keep on adding stuff. It is very difficult to get out.

It sounds like the witnesses have all recognised and acknowledged the widespread issue that drug misuse is.

Absolutely.

They have also painted a picture of schools at breaking point and in many respects being overwhelmed, that is, teachers individually but also schools.

Yes.

I thank the witnesses very much for their contributions. I thought of a number of things when I listened to the contributions. First, it is that kind of community approach. In many communities, the school is at quite a distance from the community and the services in some cases. Sometimes, it can depend on the leadership of the school or maybe the length of time a certain principal has been in the community. Some schools are not really engaged with the other services. There is a programme run by Dr. Fiona O'Reilly and Dr. Austin O'Carroll where they train GPs. It is a GP training programme to work specifically in areas that are under-resourced and underserved so that the doctors understand that it is not always a medical issue that is in front of them. There might be other social prescribing things that are necessary or they may need to understand the intergenerational piece, the trauma piece or all the other pieces.

In looking at education and the training of teachers, I will take it back from the continuous progression and development and look at the actual teacher training as it currently stands where people will cover certain topics and theories. They will look at inequality and will look at these as a classroom-based exercise. When I look at DEIS and DEIS plus schools, or what will be DEIS plus schools, instead of necessarily having in-classroom training as part of your overall teacher training - whether you are in the Marino Institute of Education or whatever university you are in to do that - some of your placement should be very specifically in local services, such as youth, drug, Traveller or domestic violence services. For me sometimes, it is not about the curriculum the teacher teaches; it is actually about how the teacher responds to a child or a family. When you have experienced any sort of deprivation or drug use - I was a drug user before I got to secondary school - you can feel when there may be judgment there, even if it is unintentional. You are hypervigilant and you will rule a teacher out, saying "not you, not you, not you", but you will allow some in. I had an amazing guidance counsellor. They managed to get me to third year, which was a big success. He was very important for that but lots of teachers made it very difficult. It was not about what they knew or did not know about addiction. It was the judgment they brought into it - the scaremongering, panic or the "ring your parents". They actually made the situation worse rather than better. For me, it is even less about what is going to be taught in the classroom, although it does need to be evidence-based but that trauma-informed piece is so important. There are kids who use drugs who will get expelled if they are caught with cannabis in school. You have kids who have been expelled from school but yet the witnesses and we as a society are acknowledging, I suppose, that there are lots of other reasons a child may be using drugs and we are making that child's situation worse instead of better.

I wonder whether there something else that is a step, before a teacher is even in the school, that does not only apply to addiction. It would apply to everything. There are kids being raised in hotels or whatever. I mean something about the care, compassion and the non-judgmental and class analysis for some teachers in their work life, and how that might impact the overall culture in general.

That is one point and the second is on the use of schools after hours. The fact that schools close means there is a real opportunity, especially for some of those parents who no longer engage. A lot of parents in communities like mine do not engage because they have had a really bad experience of school. The thoughts of re-engaging and the power dynamic in it can be quite threatening. I wonder how we might utilise schools after hours for youth spaces, women's groups and men's groups so that the school becomes a site within the community that is not only the piece that happens from 8.30 a.m. until 3.30 p.m. In New York, they have amazing community-style schools where everything happens after hours as well and the school becomes a positive experience in many different ways within the communities and it can then change the relationship between people in the community and their actual physical school space.

All hands have gone up so I will go in opposite order to the last time. Do Mr. Conneely and Mr. Bell want to come in?

What the Senator is saying is fantastic. It sounds really good. The only problem, I suppose, is that in schools we have a myriad of different teachers.

I know to look at me you would not think it, but I have been teaching for 30-plus years and my teacher training experience was very different to what it is today. We are not working with a greenfield site and that is a problem. We have a whole load of different teachers at different stages and how we get all of these people to the same level is going to be a challenge. What the Senator said is fantastic. The home school liaison programme tries to do that but again, it is not fully funded and fully implemented like it could be. That is something, again, that we have to invest in if we are going to go forward. It is all going to come down to how we invest in this and how we make the space for it, but there is definitely potential.

I teach in west Limerick in a very rural area. The engagement in services in minimal in primary schools in rural Ireland. That is not because we do not look for it; it is because the services are too busy to help us. That is a huge part of this jigsaw. Like we said, things have to be wider than schools. We all have to work together, but the services have to be there. If we cannot get OTs into our schools the way we used to 15 years ago or get advice when we need it, this is another area that is going to fall by the wayside.

Senator Ruane brought in some interesting concepts from her experiences. Fundamentally, there is a teacher supply issue across the country, but it is more acute in DEIS schools. Due to the bespoke requirements and the needs that are there, teachers are incurring a huge cost to work in that background. We have seen that it is harder to retain staff in DEIS schools. Fundamentally, it speaks to the whole notion of the cost of caring. Sometimes by going to a school with a more middle class background, the working conditions are maybe more favourable. I wanted to speak to that piece around the whole sort of typography or composition of the profession that is teaching. Fundamentally, we are a very homogenous group. Teachers tend to come from middle class backgrounds. They have tended to be very successful in a school setting. They did very well in their leaving cert, went to third level and very few of them are equipped to teach in DEIS schools. For some reason, we are not recruiting teachers out of the socioeconomic background that would lend them to having that sensitivity and appreciation of the students in those schools that the Senator speaks of.

Teachers will learn from one another in that regard if we have more diversity. They will train each other in a sense.

The relationship between teachers and students is incredibly symbiotic. When teachers are happy, students are happy, and it feeds into itself.

We touched on the competition for time in schools. I cannot speak about it enough. To the foremost, teachers, particularly management, see that the emphasis has been placed on assessment and the leaving certificate exams. However, there is also this huge requirement on teachers to prepare their students and help them out with these wider societal-based issues. When huge pressures are coming maybe from parents and the system itself to prepare towards an exam as a springboard to employment or third level, we can see there is huge pinch point.

The Senator's referred to the outreach programme and about a school being at the hub of the community. I work in an ETB school and there is huge amount of that work going on. There are night classes happening in our school. There are extracurricular activities where young hurling or football teams come in and use the facilities but that is not being replicated elsewhere. That might speak to there not being a caretaker available to open and close the school. Such is the level of intensification of the workload that the principal or teachers cannot stay any longer. Unless we have something like a shift pattern, it is very difficult to have that in place.

I thank Mr. Quinn. I have to go to Deputy Sherlock but we will have time to speak to any issue that is left over.

For consistency and the continuity of the conversation, I will let Mr. Boyle make the point he wanted, and I will ask my questions then.

I am glad that Senator Ruane changed the dial a little in the line of questioning. We focused a bit on teacher training in the profession but I think the point is well made about pre-service training. A lot of the primary teachers of Ireland make their mind up that they want to be a primary teacher before they leave the junior certificate exam. There is role for the transition year programme, and it plays a good role. We very much welcome that the Minister announced that there is going to be a mandatory special education placement when students go into the initial teacher education programmes. We are, however, concerned about the details. We feel that young teachers in their initial teacher education should not be assessed on that placement. If they are going in early, they should experience it in a non-pressure situation. There is definitely a case to be made for there to be mandatory placements in, for example, DEIS schools or some of those community initiatives the Senator referred to.

The Senator also spoke about the school being a hub. It is really interesting to note that a good number of years ago, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern announced in a blaze of glory the new project at St. Ultan's in Ballyfermot and it had that wraparound care feature. That has not really been replicated nationwide. In fact, Fingal County Council is probably one of the few local authorities that will not allow a new school building to be built unless there is a community element, such as a community hall. The council will also provide a caretaker. As the committee heard earlier, there is a lot of good work going on, such as the north west health board's initiative a few years ago, but we really need joined-up thinking across the country. There is a lot of sense in what the Senator said but it is a matter of the various Departments involved prioritising it.

I am delighted that the INTO, ASTI and TUI are here and that both primary and secondary school unions are represented here. We are mindful that we are talking about children who have addiction in their families but also about children and young adults who are misusing substances. I am glad that we are having this hearing. I want to pick on the point that Senators Ruane and Fitzpatrick made about teacher training and CPD. All too often, it is down to the exceptional teacher within a school. How do we make sure that every teacher is equipped with the tools to be able to recognise a situation that is trauma informed?

I want to return to the question of CPD. In some ways, this is a question for the wider education sector. I hear what the witnesses say about time not being allocated within the educational system to take up CPD and there are also lots of other matters and Mr. Duffy spoke eloquently about the urgent being over the important. If CPD is voluntary - and the witnesses might correct me on that - how do we reform the system to make sure there is ongoing upskilling and awareness raising not only of addiction and trauma-informed teaching and care but all the other issues that need to be looked at within the school system?

I thank the Deputy for her question, and I think it is really important. It is vital that CPD be available to all teachers.

Is it not available? Availability is one thing but take-up is the other. How do we make sure it is taken up?

If we want a system that highlights CPD in this area as being a national priority, that means it needs to be provided by the relevant aegis bodies. That could be the HSE or Oide, but it needs to be available during the school day. It is then, in essence, mandatory because it means everybody is attending in that school on that particular day or two days.

There will be an element of some being available voluntarily and some being available during the school day. Society is going to have to recognise that if we want teachers properly trained in this area, it means we close the school for a day and provide the training to every member of staff. Otherwise, only a handful of staff will be able to avail of it. We want everyone trained in this. That means training being provided to an entire school staff on a particular day, which means the school will have to close for that day. The question is whether we feel this is a national priority. I think it is a vital national priority.

To give context for Deputy Sherlock-----

I will bring Mr. Quinn back in shortly. I want to hear from all three unions at the same time.

I will outline our concept of the 30 hours for the Deputy. It is that 3% of the school year be given to CPD. That is basically the percentage across the developed world, but we do not get it in Ireland. That amounts to six school days, or two per term. That worked well for the 1999 curriculum and continued for eight years. Even though the childcare situation may have changed somewhat in the intervening 28 years, parents at that time understood the value of the State investment in teacher training on the job, so much so that they did not complain overly about the school being closed for six days in the year. If we take that into this context, I mentioned the child protection training being made available this year for one day. I do not think any parent in Ireland complained to their school principal that the school closed for that training. That is because it is vital training.

The question for the Government and the Department of education is whether drugs awareness training is as important as child protection training. If the answer is "Yes", then the exact same model should be replicated for that training and for training in dealing with behaviours of concern and crisis situations, for which no training has been provided, other than to a small number of special schools. That is a model that has been tested over time. We feel it needs to be implemented again, not just for the next curriculum but forever because there will always be big demands like this on the system. The best approach is to give people the time, training and resources to deal with it.

To give some context, Senator Ryan mentioned schools being used, etc. They are used after school. I am just recently out of the classroom. Hurling was huge in the school, which is in County Clare. It had football, GAA, soccer, you name it. It had science projects and a whole load of things going on. Teachers give a huge amount of voluntary time anyway. Having extracurricular activities in the school helps with the well-being of the community. It is a huge and practical thing. The students engage with teachers and develop a rapport with them. They might say stuff to those types of teachers. I have great respect for teachers who take teams and so on night after night. They provide this interaction for students. As such, teachers do this anyway.

It is imperative that CPD in schools takes place during school hours. Closing the school for the day would be one way of achieving this. If we want teachers to take on board these new initiatives, we also need to recognise that they are doing extra Croke Park hours, which they detest, and doing things that are not really meaningful. If there was alleviation in those areas in the background, it would help them to take on board these new initiatives meaningfully and give them their full attention. Teachers' attention is required in so many different areas now that they are spread very thin. There is cognitive overload, if you like, with all this stuff coming at teachers at the minute. The capacity for the individual teacher needs to be freed up a little, so that they can give their attention to these issues. That may seem like a slight segue into something else but that is a problem we have. Teachers are doing this extra work and are made to do Croke Park hours. They feel it is a detention after school, to be quite honest. That is one area that needs to be looked at if we want teachers to engage with these programmes. CPD during school hours would be a practical and meaningful way of doing this.

We will have another round. It is my slot now, but I am conscious that I interrupted speakers. I have tried to do that equitably. I interrupted Mr. Quinn. Would he like to take back some of that time?

I wanted to speak to Deputy Sherlock's notion around the CPD. As framed in schools at the moment, there are two different types of CPD. There is mandatory CPD, which happens when the school closes down. There is also elective CPD, where teachers engage, of their own volition, in training after school. One of my other hats is that I am on the board of management in the Monaghan Education Centre. We tracked the CPD provision. There were 78 opportunities afforded to teachers between September and December. There is, therefore, a vast array, and a competing notion, of professional development being offered to teachers.

In post-primary schools, seismic curriculum change has been undertaken, whereby we have a brand-new revamped junior cycle programme and senior cycle programme coming down the line. Teachers are at maximum capacity in terms of dealing or interacting with professional development. My colleague Mr. Duffy point out that if it is to be worthwhile, it should be mandatory and the school should be closed down to teachers time to interact with something if we deem it to be meaningful and of merit. This expectation that teachers are going to be able to do more is folly.

I was asked a question earlier. My concerns are probably a little bit different from those of other people. I know we are here to talk about drug misuse but when you talk about a subject like this, there is a whole range of things in there that are extremely difficult to deal with. I have been teaching for a number of years. I have no specific training in drug awareness or suicide prevention, self-harm - you name it. Deputy Sherlock probably has the same amount of training in this area as I do. Would a two-hour evening CPD make her feel comfortable and equipped to deal with teaching a class of 24 students about everything they need to know about drug prevention and its dangers in an evidence-based way? That is why I lean toward Mr. Boyle's point.

Two hours in the evening is not going to be enough for us to have a meaningful drugs prevention programme where our teachers are trained adequately. I believe Mr. Boyle has offered a reasonable suggestion, if we are interested. If not, we can all say it was a good talk but that the investment is not going to be put into it.

I cannot speak for the expertise of the people beside me, but I am no different to the Deputy in terms of this. I have the same level of knowledge of how to deal with drug prevention. Senator Ruane gave me huge pause for thought in asking would I come across as being judgy. I do not have those skills because I have never been trained in that respect. I doubt that a two-hour evening course is going to give me all the skills I need. If we are serious, we need to act seriously by funding this and doing it properly.

On a related point, services are missing in our schools. We have huge resources but Oide is understaffed. It does not have enough resources to do what it should be doing to provide sufficient service. Things are being put on the long finger. NEPS is another huge resource to us but, again, it is short-staffed. This is system wide. It is a much bigger issue than what our schools can do. We need more resources in all of the services that affect our schools.

I only have a short time left, so there may not be enough time to answer. When we consider moments of intervention, I was in Limerick Prison as part of a visit by members of the justice committee.

I have spent a lot of time looking at prisons, and the demographics of people in prisons are usually all the same. There are usually similar types of markers. There is often neurodiversity and poverty but there is also a huge correlation with suspensions and exclusions. From my perspective, I can absolutely understand why that happens. Do teachers feel they get enough support from the State or any form of wraparound services when any of the union's members have to take that difficult decision about exclusion and suspensions? What sort of interventions would teachers like to see for a young person who has to go down that road, understanding that places difficulties on the union's members. What are the wraparound supports the union would like to see from the State?

It is really important and it is very valid. It is a combination of the internal and the external. In some contexts, we could be talking about intergenerational drug use within a family home. We may be talking about an emerging issue in a particular family. Schools need internal supports, such as more home school community liaison, HSCL, officers, more guidance councillors and more year head positions, etc. There is also a need for external supports, and as Ms Horan has made reference to quite rightly, we need the support of CAMHS, NEPS, Tusla and the school completion programme, SCP, etc.

I want to make clear that this is in no way a criticism of the staff involved in those services. The reality is they are dealing with caseloads that are utterly unmanageable. The problem is when a student or somebody else makes a disclosure to a school of a student engaged in problematic alcohol use, smoking, vaping or illicit drug use, the school needs to be able to call on expertise internally and externally. At the moment, to be honest, those services are not at the level anyone would like them to be.

I have a point about teacher education. Certain schools that I have been involved with down through the years, along with lots of my colleagues in the INTO, made decisions for the greater good at school level that were perhaps not fully within the confines of the rules set out by the Department of education at the time. We would have closed the school, taken half days, etc., repeatedly over a period of time to engage with NEPS psychologists or engage with other training externally provided to make sure all of the staff were up to speed on different issues.

Currently, there is an initiative for guidelines for dealing with behaviours of concern in crisis situations. There was a very narrow view taken in the Department of education in relation to where these crisis situations could happen. Primarily, it felt they would happen in the special school sector. Of course, we did not agree with that because anybody who has experience of working in ordinary national schools or in the DEIS schools knows crisis situations happen in all types of schools. There are behaviours of concern in all schools.

However, it was only piloted for the special schools and there has been no engagement with the ordinary schools whatsoever. There is no word of the training provided for the special schools being replicated. There will be some training provided for the revised code of behaviour and the "bí cineálta" actions, which is welcome, but when you take specific initiatives, the Government will have to drop an initiative to introduce a new one to deal with the workload. When it does introduce one, it should be introduced with gusto and given all the supports it needs to make it successful and then move on to the next one.

That would be a big learning for me as a professional with lots of time in the teaching profession, that sometimes, despite the lack of support from the Department, you have to take the bull by the horns at school level and make the better decision for the pupils in the school.

Of course, we need access to supports. We need CAMHS and NEPS, etc. On my own background, I grew up in a council estate in Manchester. I went through the whole education system and I did okay. We still had the house there until very recently. The reason I mention this is because when I grew up, I was not aware of any drug problem. There is a house which is my family home and I have been going to it until very recently because my mother passed on and I could not believe how the drug problem developed over the past decades. It is massive in the area where I grew up and it bothers me.

The big thing with schools is that it is a very complex issue. It does not matter what training you get. We are not health professionals. We will not be able to deal with this situation. We can contribute but our role would be that we would be able to take this somewhere else and bring it to somebody else. We are not equipped and we will not be equipped after two hours of CPD to deal with these situations. We absolutely need these supports. Health professionals coming in will be crucial in this.

What level of engagement has there been with the Department over the past 12 months in trying to improve the supports that teachers have and improve the training? Has there been engagement and where are we? It was said that 2,000 out of 75,000 teachers availed of CPD within the past year. I have seen teachers being very proactive. I am thinking back to over 20 years ago in what is now a DEIS school area where teachers came back in mid-August and brought in what would be 40 children who they knew needed a head start before school resumed. They did that every day for two weeks in August and provided support to those children to make sure they fitted into the school system when it started on 1 September.

Likewise, I have been involved in projects where young people who have dropped out of schools were brought in and given a choice of courses to do. These people were over 15. The biggest problem we had with them was literacy and numeracy. When we did a survey of the people who had left us five years earlier and where they now were, 70% of them were in full-time employment. You can actually get results but the point is it has to be a system across the board that is set up.

Going back to the Department of education, where are we with the Department taking on board the training, the support and providing the skill sets for teachers to deal with the challenges that are now there? They are totally different challenges to what was there ten years ago or even five years ago. I am just wondering what progress can be made on that.

It is a real battleground. In April 2023, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, NCCA, provided a framework to the then Minister, Deputy Foley, which she did not publish for some time but eventually did, about what would be needed to support the introduction of the redeveloped primary curriculum two and a half years later. When we went to the launch of the curriculum in a blaze of glory at the Department in September of this year, we discovered the Department had a much-scaled-back plan for supporting the introduction of the redeveloped curriculum than what the NCCA had recommended to the Department. It was so much scaled back that one of the senior people in the Department openly admitted to those gathered there that Oide, which is the professional development service for teachers, was probably only resourced to about 50% of the requirement.

This was a really red flag for us because we were aware that post-primary schools were already a step ahead of us as the changes to the leaving cert was being implemented a year before the change to the primary curriculum. If Oide was only half supported to where it needed to be, the chances are that support would all be taken up by support for post-primary. Yet, the committee heard from the post-primary unions here that they are not even happy with that level of support. We are deeply concerned about next year's roll-out of the primary curriculum, including the eventual revised SPHE course, on which today's discussion is centred.

There has to be a sea-change in the mindset of the Department. There are 500 primary teachers who will be stripped out of mainstream classes because the Department did not reduce class sizes for the past three years. They will all be put on redeployment panels all around Ireland this summer. There is certainly plenty of space in Oide for those 500 teachers to be seconded as experts in the primary sector into Oide to help with the roll-out of the primary curriculum. That would be another suggestion I make and it would be a good starting point for the Government.

In fairness to other colleagues in the Department of education, we have to highlight one important development within the last year that is very welcome to the TUI, which is that SPHE is now a mandatory part of the senior cycle curriculum. We have to acknowledge that. However, as I mentioned, while it is mandatory for the school to provide it, the Constitution, quite rightly, gives parents the opportunity to withdraw their child, if they deem it so or they deem it to be their wish. There is no guarantee that every child is accessing it, even though every school is providing it.

In terms of the provision of CPD, we have to go back to the original aspect that the Department of education has said to this committee recently, quite rightly, that 2,400 teachers have been able to access CPD in this area in the last year. That is very welcome. I do not want to suggest anything else. That is very welcome, but we also have to put it in the context of slightly more than 75,000 teachers in primary and post-primary classrooms today. We have made some progress but I suggest we have quite some way to go in a situation where we are talking about drug prevention, which has to be a health priority and an education priority for the country as a whole.

It is very important that we look at the root causes of this, for example, housing. All those kinds of things are very important, including good quality housing. The socioeconomic problems need to be addressed fundamentally.

Regarding the question, there have never been as many students in the Irish education system, certainly in the post-primary system, as there are at the minute. That is a problem when trying to roll out initiative after initiative. We have an expanded drugs problem, an expanded initiative problem and an expanded population, thankfully, which is good, at post-primary and primary level, but it creates difficulties for the Department, I assume, and Oide. Where there are problems, they need to address them. If they want to bring in an initiative, they need to have the personnel to train people up, but they are just not there. That seems to be a problem. We should have proper training. We need proper training. Something like this needs to be supported in the long term because it is an important problem and it needs to be addressed. It needs to be taken seriously.

We could break this down in a million ways. If we were just to deal with schools, the pressure they are under and the legacy issues they are carrying, and were not dealing with the drugs issue, the need to educate those with disabilities and even those with challenging behaviours and all the rest of it, we would still come up short. That is a particular issue that needs to be dealt with in the education system. If we were serious about the drugs problem, and this is exactly what Mr. Conneely said, we would be serious about dealing with inequality, deprivation and all those particular issues. We would then be serious about a holistic approach. That is everything from the criminal element that impacts badly on communities, right through to the added supports that families need, and then that proper preventative stuff of actually going in and working with families.

I talked about examples. There are probably a million other examples of school campuses that have shared services. Schools like Redeemer, which is a primary school with boys and girls, works with The House at Cox's Demesne, which was in front of the children's committee. They will all talk about their under-resourcing. They will also talk, no more than Tusla does, about the increased complexity, as Mr. Conneely said. We are in a very different world. Could we get into the ins and outs of how schools have been impacted by dealing with more complex cases? Someone talked about the notion of one good adult. We are dealing with circumstances and situations where that does not always exist in a family set-up. Even the good granny is not always there; I know an awful lot of youth workers talk about that. We already know it is about resources all around, including the agencies, the support services and the school. It is all about working at once. We already know what needs to be done. Will the witnesses deal with just how bad this is at this time?

Does anyone want to come in?

It is about the complexity that schools are dealing with at the minute. We have already spoken about what is needed.

It is very complex. When the Deputy's dad retired, he probably realised it was becoming more and more complex. Even in the last six years, since I left the largest primary school in Ireland, and Ms Horan is still attached to her school, the challenges are more and more for teachers. We put some of it down to the impact of the Covid pandemic and the lack of supports that were there for children at preschool level at that time, including the lack of diagnoses and the long waiting lists. There are then the ordinary mainstream classes, which are the largest in Europe, with so much complexity within the class. It is very welcome that we have so many children from Ukraine and IPAS students included, some of whom came from trauma backgrounds as well, but the class and the actual delivery of the curriculums has become more and more challenging. There is nearly more need for a teacher to be a carer than a teacher. There was always a balance between caring and teaching but the caring aspect was less and the teaching was more. Now, teaching is being interrupted because of all the various complexes that are there. The support services are not there. On the funding, in the Deputy's constituency, we heard this morning about a principal teacher who had to ask the school community for toilet rolls to keep them going up to Christmas.

Schools are stretched to capacity but the members of unions who are working in those schools are deeply committed people. They are particularly perturbed, in the more challenging school environments, that they cannot fill their vacancies. That is putting pressure on the system as well. We are here for solutions, and it is to be hoped we offered some today.

I will let Deputy Sherlock ask her questions. Maybe the witnesses can just read the responses into the record, as she has to go.

I thank the Chair. I share and echo the sentiments on an awful lot of the issues we are talking about. If the education system or the Department took the issues of inequality and deprivation much more seriously in terms of how the school system is set up, it would certainly dramatically help that trauma-informed care. To Mr. Bell's point, two hours is better than nothing. As somebody who has undertaken trauma-informed care, I can say that. Obviously, I am not an expert, but it is certainly better than nothing. That is important for the record.

I will ask about two things. I will pick up on Ms Horan's point about the lack of interaction with health agencies. What help, if any, has the Department of education been in signposting or tying a school in with local health services, if there is a particular issue that comes? If awareness emerges in a school of a particular issue, how good or otherwise has the Department been in being able to signpost schools to where they need to go?

NEPS is very good. It is very helpful. We all have a critical incident plan. All of that has been properly developed with training. I cannot remember, when you want to get advisers into your school, where you get them from.

They are fairly scarce now. You would like to think you would get them before the critical incident occurs.

It is not even a critical incident. It is tying in the CDNT.

For ongoing supports, we are hearing from members of our executive, who have five or six special classes attached to their school, that there will be three NEPS visits in the school year. That is a school that probably needs NEPS to be in the school every week. We are working towards a more inclusive education system, and the UNCPRD is recommending this, but if you go to other jurisdictions, the first thing you notice, and I noticed it myself in Finland, they have all these therapists on site, either in the school or attaching to the local borough. In some primary schools in Finland that have preschools attached and lots of children with disabilities, I noticed they even had little swimming pools and little areas where the children could go to sleep for a while and take a nap. We are very short of all that sort of wraparound care. The Department indicates that various other Departments might help.

It is very difficult to get through to them when we really need to do so.

There is the lack of joined-up thinking. Mr. Boyle made the point about City Connects and the multidisciplinary teams that are in place. That is obviously the model there.

The final question I have relates to vaping. There were figures quoted earlier in respect of cannabis and other drugs. Some 30% of young people are vaping at the moment. What impacts are the witnesses seeing within the classroom, particularly in secondary schools? Obviously, there is some of it in primary schools as well. In the context of secondary schools in particular, what are the witnesses hearing from their members as to the impact? We have seen research that indicates increased irritability. Such research continues to emerge. Can the ASTI and the TUI shed any light as to what their members are seeing?

Although I am the president of the TUI, I was back teaching in a DEIS school in Carrickmacross as of last year. There has been an absolute explosion in terms of vaping. These things tend to be very cyclical. There is almost a perception that this is cool or that it holds credence or currency among young people. It just happened that with vaping - and especially in the context of single-use vapes that are scented or flavoured - it turned into an absolute animal. I would go so far as to say that it was endemic across all year groups right they way up. It was something that the school was actively seeking to dissuade.

Does Mr. Quinn have a view as to whether it is having an impact on student behaviour, attention and all of that?

In very logistical terms, it was leading to students leaving class. It was leading almost to truancy. It was giving rise to myriad issues. It is also the case that once we start to go down the road of implementing a code of behaviour and sanctions within a school, those involved are, fundamentally, on a slippery slope because it impacts on their educational provision.

We see a lot of kids, but it is very hard to pinpoint exactly where the irritability or lack of focus are coming from. However, we would often see kids leave class. It is very difficult to stop that behaviour. It is definitely a problem.

As well as the impact on students, it is also having a significant impact in terms of resource allocation within the school. It is tying down staff who are trying to prevent it happening. It is tying down staff in terms of investigating it. It is tying down staff in terms of them trying to deal with the aftermath of it. Significant resources are being tied up because of it.

There are two things to follow up on. We are talking about drugs. Deputy Sherlock referred to vaping. I imagine the likes of hexahydrocannabinol, HHC, or whatever can obviously lead to really complex issues in relation to children's behaviour and their ability to operate in any way, shape or form at school. There is that wider question that I am not sure was asked in relation to how prevalent and how often the issue comes across the witnesses' desks - this might relate more to secondary schools - of kids who are using and abusing not only vapes but also drugs.

The Deputy very astutely pointed out that the use of illicit drugs, generally speaking, is not happening in schools, but dealing with the aftermath of it is absolutely something that is falling to schools in a situation where the level to which the expertise and resources are available to schools to be able to deal with it is questionable. As I think all the witnesses identified, the agencies we rely on for support are, in fairness, doing fantastic work. They are working extraordinarily hard, but in many cases they do not have the resources to support schools.

They do not have the resources for the need that is out there. That is the problem. As much as we need wraparound services and for everyone to be involved, I expect that for schools this is a straightforward issue that needs to be signposted. There needs to be a support structure in place to deal with that very particular issue.

There was a study done fairly recently in Dublin 15. The results were quite alarming in relation to substance abuse, even among children in primary school, and the link between some of the children involved and a number of gangs and criminals.

What I should have said is that we are talking about intergenerational addiction at some level and the impact that has on kids. However, at times we are also dealing with kids who are doing drug runs from a very young age because they are in very dangerous circumstances. Those are more complex cases that we have to deal with.

That was a major concern. I was also an eye-opener for us. At the time that study was compiled, we were in the throes of trying to negotiate DEIS plus, the idea for which we first came up with three years ago. We are delighted it is going to be happening. However, it was for communities like that and to serve them that we felt the DEIS plus was necessary. Whenever it does happen, it is going to be really important that it is going to have the resources to be able to deal with that because it is not consistent across the country. Thankfully, it is confined. If it is not brought under control, however, we could be facing the same issue in other communities. It is a big worry for us that such a thing would be happening.

It is everywhere, but it is obviously having a bigger impact and is prevalent to a greater degree in large disadvantaged working-class areas.

In our area, we would see a lot of students who may have been academically successful falling away. Again, it is very difficult for schools to pinpoint exactly why that is happening. That brings us back to the notion of how we get a student to trust us enough to tell us what is going on. I suppose the answer would again be that we need one-to-one guidance. We need somebody-----

Someone they trust.

Someone that they can trust and can speak to. It is almost a circle all the time. We definitely do see it, however. Why it is happening can be any number of reasons, but it is to get the child to have an opportunity and a platform to open up, discuss it and then to deal with it. The Chair asked a very interesting question earlier. He inquired as to what we do when we get to the end. The answer is that we have failed at that point. We need to get to where the Chair wants us to get to before we get to that point where the student is disciplined because that is not the answer here. The answer has to be prevention. That has to be our role. However we get to that point is the big question for us.

The problem with any type of illicit substance is that it is more likely that it will lead on to something else. I am not necessarily comparing vaping with something stronger or more serious-----

With vapes, it depends on what is in them.

Yes. If we look at smoking, we had the legislation that came out regarding ordinary cigarettes. The vaping thing needs at least for legislation to be brought in. As we said, the time of many principals, vice principals and year heads can be used up dealing with this. That is a problem because, naturally, they have so many other things that they have to deal with. They also want to deal with this. Therefore, it is going to have to be legislated for. There is going to have to be legislation that restricts the sale of this stuff, and the idea-----

We were dealing with some of this yesterday in relation to single-use vapes.

The idea that students can get their hands on these substances and that there is not sufficient legislation in place is very concerning.

I just want to follow up on what Mr. Bell said about the idea of failure. We had representatives from the Northside Partnership, the House at Coxs Demesne Youth and Community Project, Archways and a number of other organisations before the Joint Committee on Children and Equality. Those entities do an awful lot of work in respect of everything from training for parents of kids with challenging needs right through to the Greentown project. They spoke about the fact that in some cases, they are dealing with three or four generations. At some level, for all the good we are doing, there is an element of failure. That is not to take away from the work of those involved, and they were not taking away from their own work either. It is just the fact that we have not got serious about any of that.

I am not saying that we can save every individual person or family, but we can definitely do a hell of a lot better. Our society would benefit in so many ways as a result.

That is a fantastic way to end. I thank the witnesses for coming in and sharing their expertise. I ask them to extend our thanks not only to the unions but also to their members for the invaluable work they do in mentally difficult circumstances. We hope their contribution to our report will make things a little better for their members and also for the communities they serve so diligently. Merry Christmas and a happy new year. We will see everyone again.