Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I welcome Professor Paul Downes, who is the director of the Educational Disadvantage Centre (EDC) at Dublin City University (DCU). Thank you for making the journey to brief the Committee in person. We have your briefing paper.

In today's evidence session, we will look at the links between socio-economic disadvantage and educational underachievement and, hopefully, at some jurisdictional and best-practice comparisons. We are in your hands, Professor Downes. The Committee has identified tackling educational underachievement as one of its strategic priorities and is keen to hear about any learning from other jurisdictions, so you are very welcome to the Committee. I will hand over to you to make your opening remarks. Please take up to 10 minutes. We will then ask questions.

Professor Paul Downes (Dublin City University): Thank you, Chair. A lack of specialist emotional counsellors in schools to address trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) is a glaring system gap in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. We are playing catch-up internationally. It is a routine feature of many jurisdictions to have on-site specialist emotional counsellors in schools. That is not reinventing the wheel but something that is routine in many countries. Norton says that, as a result of the pandemic, we are now waking up to the issue. We are taking our heads out of the sand and realising that it is an education issue that affects children's lives. The research points to mental health and early school leaving as having strong associations.

The OECD review of the delivering equality of opportunity in schools (DEIS) programme in the South looked at the issue of mental health and recognised that mental health is a poverty and social inclusion issue. We see that it is there.

I will also emphasise that the current set of services that we put in place in schools are, in many ways, fudges. Teachers cannot be therapists. They cannot address the complexity of those aspects. It is neither in their training nor do they have the time, so we need to have specialist support in place to address those complex issues.

From the diagram in my submission — the triangle — you can see the system gap at the indicated prevention level. Those are the complex needs: trauma and adverse childhood experiences. Those are different from clinical levels of need, which child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) may be looking at. That is where there is a diagnosed clinical mental disorder. We are talking about the level before that: trauma and adverse childhood experiences. I do not need to go through the full list of what they are composed of. I will just note that psychology internationally accepts that those types of life experiences are strongly detrimental to children's futures. There is a wide range: bereavement, suicide, child neglect, domestic violence and children being in the care of the state.

I recognise that your 'A Fair Start' strategy has at least named trauma and adverse childhood experiences as being an issue, unlike the Republic of Ireland's DEIS strategy of 2017, which did not refer to trauma and adverse childhood experiences. The pandemic, however, forced the South's hand, in that the Department of Education there has now recognised that, in the light of three joint Oireachtas Committee recommendations, and is saying that it wants specialist emotional counsellors in all primary and secondary schools. It has now responded to primary schools by establishing a national pilot scheme across seven rural counties. It is focusing on DEIS so-called high-poverty schools in Dublin in particular. That was at the request of principals, who were beating down the door of the Department and saying, "Look, we have students and pupils who are not coming into school because they are traumatised, lack the morale or have anxiety-related issues".

We need a proper system of response to that. In the Republic of Ireland, we see that happening in primary schools through a national pilot. We do not see it yet in secondary schools, but, and this is really remarkable, we have a situation in which, at university level — in third-level institutions — it is routine to have counsellors on-site. Is the thinking behind the situation in secondary schools that trauma, adverse childhood experiences or complex emotional issues happen only when people turn 18? If so, that is psychologically nonsensical. At secondary level, we have educational psychologists, who are not counsellors or therapists. We have career guidance counsellors, who, despite the title "counsellor", are not qualified in trauma and adverse childhood experiences. We have fuzzy language describing things such as "well-being programmes" that are not addressing that cohort or group, yet that group is highly at risk of school disengagement.

That leads me on to the related issue, which is mentioned in the submission, of alternatives to suspension and expulsion from school. That, again, is not rocket science. It is a system absurdity to have, on the left hand, services trying to keep youngsters in school at all costs and, on the right hand, people saying, "Throw them out of school". Suspension is therefore a failed strategy. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) notes a major concern with that strategy, which is also mentioned in the submission. We need a change of thinking on suspension and expulsion, whereby we may withdraw students from the classroom but keep them in school to receive specialist support. They may need multidisciplinary support: it may be a speech and language issue or it may be, and often is, a trauma-related issue. From our study of homeless men's experience of education in a largely Dublin context, we found that two thirds of them had experienced trauma in their life. Of those, a large proportion had been suspended from school. What you therefore have is a system failure, whereby people are punished for being traumatised. That has to stop. That approach is an antiquated systemic response and includes a version of reduced timetables that is taking off in the South, which is a huge concern and, arguably, in breach of the right to education.

I will foreground the interplay between educational underachievement and bullying in school, which is increasingly recognised in international research. It was also recognised in a report for the European Commission, of which I led the authorship, which highlighted the fact that bullying in school is an adverse childhood experience. The scale of research in the past decade and a half that points to not only the mental health consequences but the educational disengagement consequences of bullying in school is huge. We need an integrated bullying prevention and early school leaving strategy as part of an underachievement focus. The two have often been viewed as parallel strategic approaches, but they need to be much more firmly integrated.

I will move on to the other issues in my submission. Policymakers like to hear about quick wins: things that do not necessarily cost vast amounts of money but that can have an impact on underachievement. A positive school climate is, of course, a major aspect. We need to provide supportive relational spaces in schools that mean that the school is not just the classroom. How do we devise other spaces in schools? I see that nurture rooms are mentioned in 'A Fair Start'. I also emphasise school gardens. Primary-school pupils in inner-city areas in Dublin say that gardens calm them down and make them feel more relaxed and more at peace, meaning that they can concentrate better when they go back into school. School gardens, as cooperative spaces, are not expensive to instil in the system. A very small budget would be required for them.

Developing teachers' conflict resolution skills is a no-brainer, whereby you have teachers responding to conflict with questions rather than big directions and listening rather than just telling the child the answer. Those are basic communicative skills and approaches that we really need our teachers to have. The basic question is this: how are conflict resolution skills being delivered for teachers in initial teacher education? A related issue is loneliness. There is increasing research — post-pandemic research but even from before then — in a Scandinavian context that points out the fact that loneliness was as big a risk to early school leaving as access to academic attainment and poverty. How we create our social spaces in schools and equip our teachers to develop those social spaces is therefore an important initial focus of teacher education.

The final issue, just to keep you awake, is the topic of sleep. That is a hugely neglected issue, on which there have been easy media headlines such as, "The Government have been asleep at the wheel on the issue and need to wake up". In the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), there is the right to rest. Huge investment is not needed in order to develop a teacher's awareness of how children and young people can be aware of their sleep patterns, because if they are not sleeping, they are not concentrating in school, are not motivated and are not going to learn. They are going to be in conflict more with their peers and teachers. Almost every educational indicator will be affected by sleep issues. One of our studies, which was published in the journal 'Irish Educational Studies', pointed to the fact that even a six-week intervention — one session a week in primary schools in areas of high poverty — in which the teacher leads an initiative on self-reflective diaries so that kids are self-monitoring their sleep patterns to see how much sleep they are getting on weekdays and at the weekend saw notable changes in their going to bed earlier being forced on school days but not at weekends. That shows just how little is needed to draw attention to our students' views and their self-reflection on the issue.

It is important to note — I will finish on this point — that it is not a didactic approach, whereby we tell the students that they have to go to bed earlier. It is about their taking ownership of the issue. It is about constructing teaching methodologies that teachers will be very comfortable with across the system. Again, it is an underachievement-related issue. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you very much for your written briefing and for your presentation. The first thing that I want to say, by way of a comment, is that we sometimes have a tendency to compartmentalise issues in education. For example, we are going to think about educational underachievement here, attendance there, bullying here and health and well-being there. As a starter, you have drawn out the interconnectedness of it all of it. We cannot just talk about educational underachievement as being an issue separate from all the well-being issues that you have highlighted. That has been a really helpful start for me in order to refocus my thinking on the interconnectedness of some of the issues.

To pick up on what you said about suspensions, I have a question on that and some other things that I want to look at. I had a meeting earlier in the week with a group that is coordinated by children in Northern Ireland. It is an overarching group that coordinates the community and voluntary sector that have an interest in the rights of children. Almost without exception, everybody in the room raised concerns about the issue of informal suspensions and reduced timetables. I asked a question about it, and the response that came back from the Minister was that there is simply no data to record how much of that is happening. With regard to understanding the scale of the issue and how much of that is going on to enable us to tackle it, how important is data? I was concerned that we actually did not know.

Professor Downes: This was an issue that I raised before the last DEIS action plan in 2017 with the Department of Education in the South. I raised the concern that it neither was being monitored nor were the schools being given the resources to develop alternative strategies. Instead of doing what I hoped they would do, which was to put in extra support, they just did a data collection exercise. That then legitimised a process that was unofficial, hidden and was really bad practice from the start. By just gathering the data, you were actually almost encouraging schools to then use it as a new strategy in their repertoire.

To give an example, I saw a seven-year-old in one school, whose mother was a heroin addict, She was in a daze coming into school, and the school told me, "We have no support for this seven-year-old child". What did the school therefore do? They regularly sent the child home early back to the mother, who is a heroin addict.

That was a system failure, and I would be very concerned if that was being used as a practice coming in here as well. You could argue that it was a breach of the right to an education, especially at primary level.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): We need to understand the prevalence, but that is not an exercise in giving permission. It is about understanding the prevalence to then see how we could support schools to look at alternative strategies, if I understood that correctly.

Professor Downes: Yes.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): OK. You mentioned multidisciplinary teams supporting schools, which the Committee has discussed a lot. Rather than suspending or removing a child, a wraparound support should come in to support that child. From your research or what you have seen as good practice from your work, which professionals need to be in a multidisciplinary team, and should they be situated in a school or brought in as required? What works well?

Professor Downes: In the Southern Irish context, I told the Oireachtas Committee on Education that in Denmark there was a multidisciplinary team for every school. We were looking for just one for an area, and if we could get even that, how brilliant it would be. I was looking at areas of high poverty in particular.

What we need in those teams are, number one, specialist emotional counsellors. Number two, we need speech and language therapists. Obviously, you could have a behavioural issue that may be a language issue that maybe needs to be addressed in interplay with a counselling aspect. The other part of that would be a family support dimension. The home school community liaison scheme (HSCL) is one example of that in the Republic of Ireland. There are strengths to that approach, and that could be more part of a team. That is a teacher going out to engage with parents and families. The OECD has raised the question of whether that could be broadened beyond teachers to include other professionals such as social care workers, as distinct from social workers — social care workers or family support workers who can engage with families in a non-threatening way. We are talking about high-need families and family outreach supports. I would suggest family support workers, specialist emotional counsellors and speech and language therapists as the key aspects of such teams. Again, that has been seen increasingly in a European policy context as an issue, as well as the OECD internationally and the UN.

Schools are not just around teachers. It is often said that schools cannot solve the problems of society, but if you broaden the concept of school to include not just teachers but a wider set of professionals, you can then have a situation whereby many of the issues — not all, but many of those issues — can be addressed, because no one profession has all the answers for complex issues.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): In the South, is funding managed jointly between Education and Health, or does one Department take the lead? We have a perennial problem here where things are kicked back and forth between the two Departments, with each saying, "That is for you", and it often does not land where it needs to in schools.

Professor Downes: This is still a nascent area in the South. I was involved in designing one such team in Ballyfermot, in Dublin, some years ago. There was difficulty in getting funding from different strands. Different ministries were funding different elements. That group would have loved to have had one lead Department overseeing that, whether it was the community sector, the children's ministry sector, education or health, and how you bring those together.

I think that the penny has finally dropped. During even the recent election in the South, we saw more of a commitment to multidisciplinary teams. There is now a term used called DEIS+. That is the idea that you put these teams into the high-need schools in particular. You start with the schools in the areas of highest poverty. Yes, these teams are expensive. They are direct-delivery multidisciplinary teams. They are not sipping lattes, just talking about kids and not giving direct service intervention. It needs to be really clear what their caseload is and that each member of the team can get recognition for their distinctive contribution. Who leads that team is less important than the personality of the person who can mediate between the language of different disciplines.

Mr Sheehan: Thanks for coming in, Professor Downes. What you have been saying is very interesting. Some data came out recently — it may have been just yesterday — indicating that the suicide rate among young people in disadvantaged areas is three times that in more affluent areas. In your opening remarks you said that we have taken our head out of the sand with our recognition that there is trauma and adverse childhood experiences and so on. Just two years ago here, however, the Department of Education took the decision to cut funding for the Healthy Happy Minds programme, which was aimed at providing counselling in primary schools for children with emotional well-being issues. That was scrapped completely.

We have talked about providing wraparound support, particularly for children with additional needs. When we asked the Department and the Education Authority how many children, for example, require speech and language therapy, how many therapists there are and what the gaps are in the system, we could not get that information. There are fundamental problems there, and I am glad to hear that, in the Twenty-six Counties, the Department there has at least begun to place specialist emotional counsellors in schools. I am sure that there is a long way still to go to roll it out across the whole system.

We are interested in the DEIS system in the Twenty-six Counties. Recent Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) comparative research into the systems North and South shows that far more young people here are leaving school without qualifications, with the knock-on effect that that has on society in general. Far fewer are going on to third-level education here than in the South. The DEIS system was set up almost 20 years ago. I know that your specialism is in educational psychology, but what impact has the DEIS system had overall on educational outcomes?

Professor Downes: As you know, it is a prioritisation of resources towards schools in areas of higher poverty. Until the pandemic hit, we had made incremental progress year-on-year. Until then, you could argue that the DEIS system was the glue that held much of society together. Child poverty figures soared after the Celtic tiger crashed, and yet our educational outcomes were increasing regarding literacy, school attendance and early school leaving figures.

One of my roles is that I go into DEIS schools a lot as an examiner of student teachers, so I see the school climate in those schools. One of the first things that I would say is that there is a very warm, supportive school climate. The word "climate" is a very well-recognised term now in psychology and education. It might seem like a vague term, but it is tangible when you go into a school and you see the atmosphere, the relationships, the colours on the walls and how happy the children are, how consulted they are and how democratic they feel the spaces are. The DEIS system has helped, largely at primary-school level, but also to some degree at secondary-school level, to create a positive school climate where students have aspirations and hopes. Some of the gaps between DEIS schools and the other schools have narrowed, although not quickly enough.

There have also been successes around literacy. There was a big acceleration of focus on literacy. Literacy levels had decreased internationally even before the pandemic, but literacy rates did not go down in the Republic of Ireland like they did in many other countries. We held our scores there. That seems to have been partly because there was an acceleration of focus on literacy. Literacy is identified as a huge issue in DEIS as well. The programme for international student assessment (PISA) also recognises the fact that, if you have low literacy levels, you are at higher risk of being bullied at school, and that, as we mentioned, is a risk factor for early school leaving. Poverty is also associated, internationally, with being bullied at school.

Combined, the literacy focus and emphasis on school climate dimensions have been very important factors in the success of DEIS. Having said that, that was up until the pandemic. Since then, we have seen fallback, which is why the issues that I mentioned earlier need to be addressed in particular.

Mr Sheehan: Does addressing that require collaboration between the education system and the Health Department? We have a system of governance in which Departments are effectively independent republics. The Children's Services Co-operation Act 2015 is supposed to impose on Departments the willingness to work together. That does not always happen. There are problems with that, and there is not necessarily funding to go along with it.

We have difficulties in our education system that require Health input, so we need counsellors for children with trauma, adverse childhood experiences (ACE) or, as you pointed out, bullying and so on. There are about 1,000 schools in the North. If we were going to put a counsellor and a speech and language therapist, never mind a whole multidisciplinary team, into those schools, there would be an issue terms of resources. Each Minister is precious about their own budget, but, if they were to work together, they could have a longer-term impact on reducing incidents of children and young people leaving school without qualifications, mental health issues in future life and so on.

Professor Downes: I fully accept your argument for interdepartmental communication. I will come on to that in a second. At the start, however I will say that we have managed —.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I ask you to be as brief as possible, because time is against us.

Professor Downes: Sure. We managed to get the previous Education Minister to recognise that mental health is an education issue, not just a health issue, and that Education has therefore to take the lead on putting counsellors into schools. Your 'A Fair Start' document commits some budget towards that at primary level, but that needs to be extended to secondary schools. In the South, aspects of interdepartmental cooperation happen through the children's ministry, but it is a work in progress. That is an international problem. I was involved in the European Commission in 2014, asking them to put a survey out across Europe into cooperation across health, education and social service ministries, and many countries were weak on that collaboration. It involves a change in thinking, and it is happening. Is it happening quickly enough? I would argue that it needs to happen much more quickly in both areas.

Mr Sheehan: The difficulty — I will be very quick here, Chair.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): You need to be very brief.

Mr Sheehan: The difficulty, if Education wants to recruit counsellors, is that the Health Department trains counsellors. It decides how many places there should be in universities to train counsellors, for example. We have difficulties that may be unique to here, or it may be that they are not. The other issue, of course, is academic selection. That puts children under enormous difficulty. I do not know whether you are across that issue.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): We are very nearly out of time. In fact, we are out of time, so give the quickest answer that you can give.

Professor Downes: OK. I might come back on that, linked to another question.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): That is grand.

Ms Hunter: Thank you so much for being here, Professor. I found your briefing fascinating to read and I can tell that you are passionate about the subject from your oral briefing today. On mental health in schools, there was a Happy Healthy Minds scheme here for which the funding was cut. That scheme entailed music therapy, art therapy and giving children the opportunity to express how they were feeling emotionally. The funding for that was cut. We heard from some parents that children were finding out, less than 24 hours before their next session, that there would not be a next session. Your being here to speak to the importance of having trauma-informed counsellors in both primary and secondary schools could not be more timely.

You made some fantastic points about bullying and emotionally based school avoidance. I ran a survey recently, and we spoke with hundreds of parents about the experience of their children feeling isolated in the school space and not wanting to go back. In some cases, if not the majority, the issue was bullying. The Chair touched briefly on data and monitoring in the North, and we had a session on it with the Department of Education. I find our policies on bullying to be weak. The Department could not point to the nature of the bullying — whether it was homophobic, for example, or sectarian — because it had no data on that. What more can we do on bullying? Do we need better monitoring? Do we need better awareness campaigns? What can the Education Committee do on that issue?

Professor Downes: OK. One low-resource thing that every school could do is have a driving committee for a whole-school approach to students' voices and well-being, which would include issues such as bullying and also challenging authoritarian teaching — rule by fear — and which would have teeth, perhaps with the principal being involved. We recommended a driving committee in every school in one of our EU Commission reports; that is an obvious action.

The other point is about intervening early — this is where counselling is so important — to stop the consequences of bullying getting worse. Victims of bullying — the perpetrators also need these supports — get into a cycle of self-hate and self-doubt. "Double victimising" is the term that is often used, because they blame themselves. You need early intervention to happen quickly to stop the fire going further. The counsellors can serve as an early intervention approach in the school to address that aspect.

I note that we are looking at one-to-one counselling supports. Some well-being programmes are at the universal level of a school or include group-based stuff, and, as the serious gap in our strategy on death, for example, has been one-to-one specialist supports, we want to get away from those programmes. Twenty years ago, when I designed the service in Ballyfermot, we saw eight-week bereavement counselling supports. You cannot, in eight weeks, overcome the death of a parent or major figure in your family or suicide-related issues. Some of those things have been gimmicks, frankly, and they need to stop. The supports need to be sustained, with counsellors embedded in schools as staff members, not loosely rotated across a panel of many schools. We argue that each specialist counsellor should be embedded in one or two schools at most and that that person should not be a teacher but have a different role.

Ms Hunter: That is a fantastic answer and definitely something that we can take away after your briefing. My last question comes from reading 'Toxic Childhood Stress' by Dr Nadine Burke Harris. I was really surprised to read that adverse childhood experiences shape not only life experiences but life expectancy. I am mindful of that because we live in a post-conflict society with so much going on: post-conflict division, addiction, high rates of domestic violence and the high suicide rates that you alluded to. I have a particular interest in addiction in the home, and I recently spoke with the National Association for Children of Alcoholics about how addiction shapes the life of a child in their home. When it comes to educational underachievement, I really want to keep our eyes on those children, because that issue is often pushed to the side. Will you speak to how addiction in the home shapes the minds of children and what more we, as a Committee, can do to support them? I note what you said about seeing the benefits of early intervention and support later in life.

Professor Downes: Yes, sure. It is about family support outreach workers going to the home and family therapy supports that may be more community-based than school-based. In the predecessor to the family-based service, which I was involved in designing, the term that was used was —. You will not necessarily be able to solve all the family's issues, but you can put in supports to alleviate the impact on the child's education so that you stop some of the consequences of the family's difficulties for the child.

It may be about making sure that they get to school or that they have emotional counselling support. It is important that there is a strategy for the different levels. There could be collaboration. Schools could do a lot more with family support services. I have asked many school principals what their links are with family support services. They may be just down the road, and, often, there are not huge links.

There is also a family privacy issue to address, which we need to recognise. 'A Fair Start' acknowledges that mental health issues are 25% higher in Northern Ireland than in the rest of the UK. As you know, that situation is an issue that is particularly impactful in this context. It behoves you to make a systemic contribution here, but I urge you not to repeat the error of the South, which has been to put them in primary schools. I see that that is in the document. It is great to have them in primary schools. We want them, but it is quite remarkable that secondary schools are being omitted from that strategic approach. I reiterate that secondary school teachers and generic, pre-packaged well-being programmes are not adequate substitutes for the complexities of one-to-one tailored, specialist support of guidance counsellors.

Ms Hunter: That is really helpful. Thank you so much for those answers. I was looking through some of the stats, and they show that one in eight children in Northern Ireland has emotional difficulties and struggles with their emotions. When we are talking about education, we have to see how those things are directly linked with one another.

Professor Downes: Those are pre-clinical levels. That is why it is an education issue and not simply a health issue: it is prior to getting to the level of the clinical diagnosis to stop things happening in the future, but those difficulties have big educational impacts at that pre-clinical level.

Ms Hunter: That is brilliant. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): It may be worth pointing out that 'A Fair Start' highlighted the need for primary counselling. We ran a pilot, as the Deputy Chair mentioned, but the resource was not put in to do anything more with that.

We are probably in the opposite scenario to you, in that we have a counselling service commissioned in secondary schools but nothing in primary schools. We are completely flipped the other way, despite the recommendations in 'A Fair Start'. It is a different problem, but those are two sides of the same coin.

Mrs Guy: Thanks for the presentation. You inject a lot of energy into the room, which is always welcome. I will go back to the bullying stuff that Cara raised and that I have a bit of an interest in. I recently met the guys in DCU to talk about the work that they are doing in schools in the South. It is hugely impressive, and, as you have referenced, their emphasis is very much on the preventative side. We have legislation here, but it is quite a reactive approach. The teams do a great job, but that preventative approach to bullying seems to be particularly effective, or very much what we need.

You talked about poverty being one factor in people being bullied. Are there any other specific demographic groups that are more likely to be bullied and that face the consequences of school avoidance and underachievement?

Professor Downes: It depends on the jurisdiction and the context, but there are well-recognised discriminatory bullying concerns, whether they are based on ethnicity, religion or sexuality. There are many aspects that you would look at jurisdiction by jurisdiction internationally.

Mrs Guy: We do not capture data from schools on what the specific reasons are, so that is something to consider.

Professor Downes: Yes. Data is very important. I will also emphasise that the class teacher can, for bullying prevention, really generate the climate of cooperation and connection in a class. A whole-school approach is very important for creating a system of supportive relations. Even with something as simple as group work in a primary school classroom, you are developing perspectives on cooperation, negotiation, interaction and listening skills. All those are broader social skills and capacities that we need to build into our education system, which, in fairness, I am sure that you are doing. They are the kind of wider system protections. You also have the driving committees in schools.

The other issue that has arisen internationally is discriminatory bullying by teachers. A study by Elamé et al argued that the role of the teacher is of fundamental importance in integrating minority students or migrants into a classroom. When teachers treated everyone equally, the pupils and students picked up on that and did not start bullying the migrant groups. The teacher can play a huge role in setting the classroom culture, and the school can create a culture of cooperation, which is important, as is the point made in the Norwegian context: some school principals do not want to face the issue; they want to pretend that it does not exist. Therefore, it is very important that you have a culture of support for principals to help them to confront and address the issue and not to see it as a poor reflection on their school. It is an international problem that we need to address systemically.

Bullying has a big impact on early school-leaving. It is not rocket science. Any adult being bullied in the workplace would complain or walk out, but their attendance would probably be hindered if they were going into such an atmosphere. Another international study notes the impact of the fear of bullying.

You do not even have to be the victim of bullying for it to impact on your school attendance and on early school-leaving. Even if you know that you are going into an environment where there is a prevalence and fear of a teasing climate and you know that you might be bullied — it may not be you today, but it might be you on Friday or whenever — that fear creates a lack of engagement or a willingness to avoid school. We need to synchronise and integrate our focus on underachievement with a robust focus on bullying prevention here.

Mrs Guy: Yes, as well as the idea of the role of teachers in this and their training and support around bullying. The DCU guys said to us that you have to be decisive, act really quickly and not let the thing fester. You mentioned that in your evidence as well. I had a recent case where something went on for a year, and it has had a devastating impact. You are quite right: that child, in the way that she is perceived within the wider school community, is on her own now. Nobody comes near her or talks to her, and the effect of that on her educational performance has been absolutely devastating for the family and for that child.

First, teachers need to recognise that that has happened. They need to be equipped with the right skills to identify that stuff easily and be empowered to act on it.

Professor Downes: I will say again that, at a universal level, it is how the teacher's role creates the climate in the classroom. However, there is not just one bullying problem or issue. There are different motivations from the bullying perpetrator, and there will be that entrenched group of individuals who may have experienced a lot of pain themselves — it goes back to the trauma point — and who are basically perpetrating a chain of pain. They are in pain, and they externalise their pain to hurt others. There is research to show that entrenched bullying from age seven is a predictor of later psychiatric problems, never mind criminality issues.

There is also the issue of the family support dimension. Family issues at home may be spilling out into some motivations for the bullying perpetrators. Again, it is not fair that the teacher would be the only professional to address that layer of complexity. That is why we need the family support outreach workers and the counsellors and therapists in schools. An integrated approach can kill a few birds with the same stones, in that there are a number of diverse problems that can be solved with common supports embedded in a sustained way in the system.

Mrs Guy: Thank you.

Mr Martin: Paul, thank you so much for your evidence today. My first question is a technical one. In 2018, when I wrote a policy document for my party, the DUP, on ACEs and trauma in Northern Ireland, it was the first such paper that we had looked at. When Felitti listed adverse childhood experiences, initially, there were eight, and then it went up to 10. I might have misinterpreted this, but, in your evidence today, your list started with domestic violence, substance abuse, neglect and mental illness. Is that your interpretation of ACEs? Is that a list of your ACEs, or are those things that contribute to them?

Professor Downes: Those are internationally recognised ACEs that have been developed over a number of years.

The only one that is my interpretation is "bullying in school". That is the only one that I have added to the previous list. I put it in on the basis of our EU Commission report, where we saw that the range of research in the recent decade or so pointed to the long-term impacts — these were very impressive studies with large-scale samples across many jurisdictions — of bullying on physical health, mental health and educational attainment or engagement. Bullying is the only one of those that is my twist. You are right to ask whether they are my particular interpretations of ACEs: that one is.

We should note as well that a European Parliament Committee went as far as to argue that bullying in school is a child protection issue, not only a child welfare issue. Our report of 2016 for the Commission, on the basis of a review of international evidence, came to a similar conclusion.

Mr Martin: Brilliant. I will keep going. That is really useful. I think that I counted 14 ACEs. I am sure that you will know the answer to that. The Felitti list of ACEs and the revised list that WHO put out in 2020, which went to 10, have ACEs additional to the ones that you have. You have "abuse" in there, but they say that there are three separate ACEs within abuse: sexual, physical or domestic and —.

Professor Downes: Absolutely, yes. You are correct: I have shortened that.

Mr Martin: That is fine. Adding the list of ACEs that you provided to the 2020 list from WHO would form quite a long list. The question that I am heading towards is this: in your eyes, does the extension of what was initially quite a short and succinct list of factors — Felitti later revised it and said that the additional ones were "key" — dilute anything?

Professor Downes: I look at this from an educational perspective of underachievement and the risk of early school-leaving, as well as systems solutions. All the issues in the range of issues there are predicted to impact detrimentally on educational achievement. From that perspective, I am not making that distinction. The simple, common system solution that I proposed is that of specialist one-to-one counsellors in schools. Yes, of course, they will also be interconnected. As you are aware, I am sure, Sir Michael Rutter's work on ACEs initially points out that it is not about the particular risk factor; rather, it is the "cumulative risk" of a number of them.

Mr Martin: Four was the number that was accepted as the baseline for risk.

Professor Downes: Yes, when you add them together. Of course, the other one that you could put in is the global pandemic. It may not be an ACE, but it is a risk factor on top of those other ones. That is part of the rationale for why, post pandemic, we really need to accelerate a focus on this issue.

Mr Martin: That is very useful. I will just keep going. You mentioned — I think that I scribbled these down right, but you can correct me — speech and language therapy, counselling and family support as key units, perhaps within the DEIS programme, that are quite transformative in schools and so forth. Did I get that list right?

Professor Downes: The family support part in DEIS is a home-school liaison teacher. The OECD has argued that that could be broadened beyond a teacher. There are arguments for and against that. As part of a multidisciplinary team for the extremely high need families that your colleague referred to, you need a skill set beyond that of a teacher. You would need social care worker-type support, as distinct from that of a social worker. The DEIS counselling strategy is not in DEIS itself. It has come since DEIS and in response to the pandemic. The last DEIS strategy was in 2017, but the social inclusion unit in the Department of Education has now managed to get counsellors into 60 DEIS schools in Dublin. That is the new strand that has come through since last October.

Mr Martin: That is very useful. I do not doubt that. At the Committee, I carry the flag for the impact of speech and language therapy in particular as an early intervention.

I will take you all the way back, bearing in mind that —

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Briefly, Peter.

Mr Martin: Absolutely, Chair.

— those are all very useful interventions, especially when they are made early, to the title of your report, 'A Socio-Emotional Health Focus to Address Educational
Underachievement and Socioeconomic Deprivation' . The paper refers to a "health focus", Paul. What is your understanding of how the Government in the Republic work, in that, if that focus were to be realised, is there any mechanism by which the Department of Health, recognising that these things have an impact on kids and that the earlier intervention occurs the better — for that matter, the earlier the intervention, the cheaper those interventions are, because the longer these things go on, the more expensive the intervention becomes and the worse the outcomes for the child — can collaborate on budgets? A lot of what you have said is really good. The question that the Committee would then have is how we would fund all that if we brought it up to Northern Ireland. Are you aware of any budgetary collaboration between Health and Education in the Republic on funding those programmes? If so, on what?

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): You promised to be brief. Please be brief.

Mr Martin: That was one of my briefest questions.

Professor Downes: I would throw Justice in there —

Mr Martin: I agree.

Professor Downes: — for potential early prevention. Justice could come in for certain funding strands. In the South, we have five different Ministries all nominally addressing this issue. We have not only Education, Health and Children but the Department of the Taoiseach has an anti-poverty unit as well. You can go into other Ministries too. The Department of Social Protection provides hot meals. There are five Ministries, and the collaboration could, of course, be better.

The question to ask, which is one that I would put to our Department of Education as well, is whether you can engage the Department of Health to use some of its budget for joint, collaborative initiatives. That is a live issue. There are a lot of models of interdepartmental groups, and DEIS itself was and is an interdepartmental initiative, largely in the Department of Children and the Department of Education. The pandemic opened our eyes to a lot of these issues as well, so there is certainly a strong argument that we need that extra limb. I will make the point, though, that trauma and adverse childhood experiences are Education issues, not the preserve of Health alone.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I ask members to get to questions as quickly as possible so that we are not beaten by time and can get through all the enquiries.

Mr Baker: My first question will be quick, and it follows up on a question from Pat on academic selection that you did not get a chance to answer. Children here are labelled as failures at the age of 10 if they fail that exam. I want to give you the opportunity to answer the question on what Pat started.

Professor Downes: It is very hard for any educationalist to support academic selection at age 10 or the failure identity that comes with being labelled a failure. Internationally, the OECD has pointed out that there are 10 steps to equity in education. It has also talked about delaying academic selection. To me, the argument is to put it back as far as possible in the school timeline. For state exams, for example, you may need to have honours maths classes, which is not the case with other subjects, so the issue of delaying selection for as long as possible has to be addressed. There is also the issue of how you work on teachers' skills to teach different levels. We examine students on their capacity to differentiate between different levels in the same class.

The OECD, the EU Commission and many international groups have pointed to a swathe of international research on trying to stop early academic selection, as well as on failing students and not letting them progress with their age group, the discriminatory effect of which on, for example, the Traveller and Roma communities, is well recognised. All those aspects are there.

I have homed in on certain limbs of an underachievement strategy. I recognise that there are other, wider limbs to home in on, not necessarily just those that have been the focus of my contribution today. There is so much international research on the damaging effects of early academic selection.

Mr Baker: Would it surprise you, then, to know that the Education Minister has no interest in addressing the fact that we still have academic selection at the age of 10?

Professor Downes: On the question of whether I am surprised, I will not get into giving an emotional response to individual politicians.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): You are not required to go into the political arena if you are not comfortable with that.

Professor Downes: All I will say is that international research, including by the OECD and the European Commission, points to the importance of delaying those processes as far as possible.

Mr Baker: That ties into everything that has been said today, particularly about school attendance. In the constituency that I represent, there is a grammar school that is just a stone's throw away from a comprehensive school, but attendance can be as high as 96% or 97% in the grammar school and as low as 82% in the comprehensive school. That is a knock-on effect of comprehensive schools always having to do the heavy lifting when it comes to the support that our young people need on their journey.

Professor Downes: Non-attendance is a behaviour for which there are many motivations, just as the reason why you might go into the city centre could be different from the motivation of someone else going into the city centre. You cannot draw 1:1 correspondence for the behaviour as if there were only one motivation. We should be asking the young people themselves why they are not going to school — what the reasons are. If we did that, we would find a diversity of reasons, some of which may be linked to bullying, which we have mentioned. Others could be to do with loneliness or issues of peer exclusion. Over a lot of years, the issues that I have heard a lot about in the Southern Irish context are clashes with the class teacher and teachers' communication skills. The latter could be, "The teacher talks down to me," or, "The teacher's picking on me". That is a perception. It does not mean that it is true. It is about teachers communicating not through anger but instead being constructive. I mentioned the restorative practice approach. That has no cost; it is free. There are kinds of questions that teachers can ask to foster the empathy skills of students as well as their own empathy and perspective-taking skills. There is a whole range of reasons for a young person doing that. Of course, in many contexts, discrimination is also a big factor.

It is, again, about a whole-school system strategy. The term that we have used in the EU Commission reports is "inclusive systems". That is about creating an inclusive system in schools whereby students feel that they are being treated fairly and that they have a voice. A Greek study pointed out that the schools in which most bullying takes place are those in which students feel that they are being treated unfairly and are alienated from the system. It is about a whole-school system approach and a whole-community approach to creating, as a basic point, environments into which students wish to go. That is another point: school has many different spaces; not only the classroom. It is about whether you can create different spaces, having multiple sites in a school and non-homogenous space so that different parts of school are meaningful to the diverse needs of your student demographic.

Mr Brooks: I will not draw you into the politics of academic selection

, other than to say that I am very much on the other side of the fence from Danny. I will not go down that route.

Mr Baker: That is the case on a lot of issues.

Mr Brooks: Yes, on a lot of issues.

I will not ask a question about bullying, but it has been interesting to hear that issue being grappled with. I think that, even anecdotally, we all probably know people who have suffered bullying, particularly in their childhood, and whose character and life thereafter have been shaped by that experience at a very early age. We need to grapple with that issue.

I was interested in the point that you raised about sleep loss and sleep health. I thought that the idea of kids keeping a sleep diary and being able to self-analyse by asking, "Is this a good thing?", or, "Is this a bad thing?" was interesting.

Are you aware of any work that has been done, particularly in the modern era, on the leading causes of bad sleep health? I am thinking of screen time, but some of the family issues that you talked about might be there as well. Perhaps you are more aware of them than I am.

Professor Downes: Yes, that is a good point. There is research pointing out that, for example, using electronic devices makes young people struggle to go to sleep. The pandemic did not help, because it broke patterns of sleep. You are right to point out that there is also a cohort of students who may not be sleeping because they are too stressed. As I pointed out when I was arguing for school hot meals, in a Southern Irish context, and pointing out that that is much more developed here, hunger can stop people sleeping. Poor sleep health is a behaviour for which there are many motivations, so we need to address them.

As I emphasised, it is about student ownership of the issue. We learned from one of our studies that, if you tell students to go to bed early, they will probably go to bed later. We did a recent study in which a school nurse was trying to develop a programme on sleep awareness in a primary school setting of high poverty. To be blunt, the pupils reacted the other way and went to sleep later. That is a well-known phenomenon in health: if you tell someone to do something, from later primary level onwards, the odds are that they will not do it; they will do the opposite. There are ways in which you develop skilled approaches. My point is that teachers are well equipped with their teaching methods to develop that part of the solution, which is not an expensive public policy initiative. The outside professional does not need to come into the classroom. You may have a bit for a nurse or someone else to talk to parents about — there is a parental dimension there, as there was in our first study — but the ownership of the process, the diaries and all that is led by the class teacher. There is a proportionality principle. That is low-hanging fruit. You can make a big change to people's lives by making them aware that it does not help them if they feel wrecked coming into school because they have been sleeping badly. However, I reiterate the point that it seems to be easier to make the argument for them to go to sleep earlier on a school day than on a weekend. The weekend habit is more entrenched.

Mr Brooks: I appreciate that. It is an interesting point to explore.

I do not want to be perceived as coming from a particular direction on this, because I find some of it interesting to explore. I can certainly see the arguments against expulsion, suspension and all that. You talked about authoritarian teaching: how much do your views on expulsion and suspension apply to other sanctions, such as detentions? What is the appropriate use of the sanctions in a teacher's arsenal? How should teaching be adapted in that way? Teachers will probably start to feel under pressure about what sanctions can be used. Counselling will have an answer for some of the issues but not for everything.

Professor Downes: That is a good question. A principal in a school in Kosovo once said to me, "Paul, we are not paid enough to be nice to the students. Our salaries are not high enough". My answer was the medical injunction, primum non nocere: first, do no harm. Any professional has at least the basic status of not harming the people with whom they are working. The first thing that I would say is this: take anger out of it. Teachers need to have other communicative skills than communicating through anger. I have seen teachers in schools screaming in youngsters' faces over the years. It is just poor communicative practice. You would not expect a nurse or doctor in a hospital to shout at a patient. Certain communicative strategies should be not just phased out but eliminated quickly. An anger-based approach is one.

The other question is what alternatives there are. I focus particularly on suspension and reduced timetables because they remove young people from school. Your one — detention — is giving them more school.

Mr Brooks: That is the one that I was thinking about.

Professor Downes: My focus would be on trying to give them meaningful activities rather than those that are purely for punishment. The punishments are just going to make them hate school more. You need to find things that will help them, such as behaviour contracts, where you involve them in designing solutions for their behaviours. Students do not simply have conglomerations of behaviours, however; they also have emotions and thoughts that need to be engaged with. Their ownership of such a process would be an important part of that.

I am going to be very clear: I think that reduced timetables, suspensions and expulsions are very detrimental to mental health, education and well-being. Detentions do nothing like the same scale of damage.

Mr Brooks: I can understand that, and I do not think that I am too far from anything that you said there. I was just wondering how that would be extended to other sanctions and so on. I appreciate that explanation.

Related to that, you talked about the committees that drive that and the democratisation of it in schools. I am not sure that I grasped fully what that was exactly, in terms of pupil involvement. You talked about teachers leading that. I may have got this wrong, but it sounded almost that if a teacher had been too authoritarian they could be called to that committee. What does that look like? It sounds like half student council, half —?

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Time is very nearly going to beat us. I will ask you to answer that as concisely as possible and we will draw the session to a close.

Professor Downes: Yes. The membership of such a committee would be partly to do with the local circumstance of the school. Students' voices need to be part of that in order for it to be meaningful. Its broad parameters would include things such as bullying, supportive atmospheres in school, inclusion and avoiding loneliness and so on. It is about creating a broad culture of inclusion and involving all the stakeholders, including parents, as you would for any initiative.

However, it is about more than just a student council. It might involve anonymous student surveys. In order to make it meaningful, it has to address some problems in the school and then work on pathways — perhaps not alone — for solutions.

Mr Brooks: That gives me a clearer idea. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): On behalf of the Committee I want to thank you for that wide-ranging and informative briefing. We appreciate the time that you have taken with us to go through so many of those interconnected issues. Thank you.

Professor Downes: Thank you so much.