A copy of our presentation has been circulated to members. It begins with an historical note outlining the psychological services available to schools in this country.
The first psychological service for schools was initiated in 1960 by the City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee to serve schools under its remit. In 1965, the Department of Education established its own psychological service. The function assigned to the psychologists was the development of guidance service in the new comprehensive schools and, afterwards, in post-primary schools generally. I mention that because we are often asked why we started the service in post-primary rather than primary schools.
In 1990, a pilot project for the development of a psychological service to primary schools was undertaken by the Department's psychological service in one urban disadvantaged area and one rural area. In 1991, County Dublin VEC established a psychological support service for the schools under its remit.
In 1997, the then Minister for Education set up a planning group to survey existing psychological services to schools and to make recommendations on future provision. That group reported in 1998, recommending the establishment of a National Educational Psychological Service with an ultimate target of 200 psychologists in the educational system, a psychologist to student ratio of 1:5,000. It also recommended that the service should be organised in ten regions equivalent to the health board regions in order to facilitate liaison and collaborative work between the sectors.
The Government accepted the recommendations and, on 1 September 1999, NEPS was established on an administrative basis in the Department of Education and Science. It was to be developed over a five year period until 1 September 2004. It is envisaged that NEPS will be established on a statutory basis under the provisions of the Education Act 1998 but currently it is effectively a section of the Department.
In April 2000, the management committee of NEPS presented to the Minister a draft development plan on its roll-out to schools and, in 2001, followed this with a statement of strategy. We will begin a new strategic statement next year. I look forward to the feedback from this meeting in that regard. The current task of NEPS is to implement the report of the planning group and to achieve the targets set in the statement of strategy.
On the professional side, the Government decision to establish NEPS included details of how staff numbers were to increase gradually over the five year development period. The final total of psychologists in the educational system will be 200, so the actual final total within NEPS will depend on the number of psychologists elsewhere in the system. That figure has fluctuated. The estimate varies between 176 and 184. There is provision in the report for a review of staffing at the end of the development period.
When we were established in 1999 30 psychologists in full-time permanent employment transferred to NEPS and they were joined by 13 psychologists on secondment to the agency. Although the recruitment of psychologists by the Civil Service Commission has been more time-consuming than envisaged, good progress has been made. Two competitions have been held and there was an excellent response to the advertisements. There were more than 300 applications for the first competition and more than 200 for the second. Currently, there are 127 psychologists in NEPS, plus two on career break. Offers of employment are currently being made to five psychologists who remain on the Civil Service Commission panel.
The task of inducting and mentoring so many newly appointed psychologists has been a challenge for NEPS, and a faster rate of expansion would have been difficult to sustain. It should be borne in mind that while psychologists can, in certain circumstances, work from home, administrative staff need to be located in an office. The roll-out of administrative staff has depended on the availability of office accommodation. Some 22 members of our administrative staff, including three dedicated IT staff, are based in the head office, Frederick Court, Drogheda, Clondalkin, Blackrock, County Dublin, Clonmel, Cork, Castlebar and Sligo. It is expected that, in the near future, additional administrative staff will be allocated to Tralee and Cork.
NEPS is working with the Department and the Office of Public Works to develop a national network of regional and local offices in approximately 24 locations. This places a heavy burden on NEPS head office which has to deal with general project management, services, furniture, IT equipment and relocation of psychologists. We have prepared two appendices: one illustrates the location and status of regional and local offices and the other illustrates which members of professional and administrative staff are based in the different regions. Some 23 psychologists are currently home-based. It is our aim to ensure everyone has office accommodation.
ICT has a major role in NEPS in facilitating a quality service in enhancing communications, in providing access to information and data, and in improving efficiency and effectiveness. Current NEPS ICT structures include a technical support unit which supports staff in relation to hardware and software, and is involved in the establishment of a separate IT domain for NEPS. Currently, six NEPS offices have been brought on line. We have two main projects in the IT area. The first is Casetrack, a client tracking system developed in March 2002 in conjunction with the IT unit in the Department of Education and Science. It provides case management facilities to psychologists who will track students who have been seen by NEPS and will facilitate statistical analysis of this aspect of the work of the agency. Three versions of the application are in use: a network version in Dublin offices linked to the NEPS domain; a stand-alone PC version, used by a small number of home-based psychologists, and a paper based system. While these systems are operational, difficulties are being experienced in providing administrative resources to support the system.
The second project is the weightings database developed in conjunction with the IT unit of the Department of Education and Science in 2001. It is designed to assist in the equitable allocation of psychologists to schools. It draws on data from existing Department of Education and Science schools databases and assigns weights based on criteria witch reflect the need for psychological services. We have the only database covering primary and post-primary schools. A review of the operation of the weighting database is currently under way.
Page 4 of the document contains the financial summary showing the pay and non-pay elements and the total financial outturn.
NEPS serves approximately 1,790 primary schools and 650 post-primary schools. A table in our submission shows the coverage in each region broken down by schools and pupils. We have tended to concentrate first on large schools with high levels of disadvantage, which means that the coverage of pupils is higher than the coverage of schools. We now have full coverage of all mainstream schools in County Kerry and in the Connemara Gaeltacht and the east coast region is practically on target. There has been difficulty in recruiting psychologists for certain areas of the country, notably the mid-west, the midlands and the north west.
The report of the planning group recommended a ratio of one psychologist to approximately 5,000 students. This has now been refined by the introduction of the weighting database, which gives a points weighting to each school. As additional psychologists are appointed, each is given the number of points recommended rather than a number of students. This means there is a fair degree of uniformity nationwide in the psychologist to student ratios, but not in terms of coverage per county. We do not serve the VEC schools in the Dublin city and county.
I will now describe the service to schools. The report of the planning group recommended that NEPS psychologists should devote 65% of their time in schools to individual casework and 35% to support and development work. The NEPS model of service to schools is outlined in the leaflet that has been supplied to the committee. Our aim is to provide a flexible response. Each psychologist has a list of named schools to serve, which are visited on a regular basis. The number of visits per school per annum is determined by the information on the weighting database, with other factors also being taken into account, if necessary.
At the beginning of each school year, the psychologist meets the principal and support staff to agree on a work plan for the school year using a standard form. This plan may need to be adjusted during the year, as new priorities emerge. During each psychologist's visit to the school, there will be an opportunity to discuss children who have not been referred as well as those who have been referred. Psychologists can offer advice to teachers on learning support programmes and behavioural management for the non-referred children, thus benefiting many children with whom we do not have individual contact.
In April 2003, the east coast region conducted a survey of all its psychologists, to determine such matters as waiting times for assessment, numbers of projects, etc. The details can be made available to the members of the committee, if requested.
Individual psychological assessment is a core skill of the educational psychologist. It is part of a collaborative process that also includes school-based testing, programme planning, intervention, monitoring and review of progress. The Department now places the primary responsibility for assessment on teachers. Recently published documents emphasise the importance of a cycle within which the assessment of need is part of the intervention. The main role of the psychologist is to support and advise teachers in this process and only to involve themselves in casework where the school's interventions have been insufficient or if the child needs additional resources or facilities.
In recent years, dissatisfaction has been expressed with the level of availability of individual psychological assessments. The large demand is due, for the most part, to the procedural requirement that psychological reports be furnished if schools are to obtain extra resources from the Department in respect of children with special educational needs. To meet this demand we initiated the scheme for commissioning psychological assessments for those schools that do not yet have access to NEPS. It is a limited psychological service.
The Department is examining alternative ways of ascertaining the need for extra resources for individuals or groups of children. This is being discussed with the partners in education and should reduce the demand for individual assessments. We ask psychologists to include in their service plans time for urgent cases that might not have been included in the school plan - for example, severe behavioural difficulties or severe disability or children who are the subject of legal proceedings. Such requests are responded to in a matter of days.
Page 7 of our submission contains a table showing the number of assessments carried out by NEPS psychologists only and not by SCPA psychologists. I apologise to members of the committee for the incorrect numbering on the tables in the document.
Support and development work arises either out of general concerns raised by the school principal and staff at the initial meeting or out of the psychologist's individual casework in the school. Some examples are supplied in the model of service leaflet. I have also given two examples of larger-scale projects.
The screening project, which is taking place in all primary schools in County Leitrim and in Dundalk is being carried out in partnership with the primary curriculum support programme, PCSP, the Educational Research Centre, ERC, and the in-career development unit, ICDU. The aim is to inform the Department of the probable prevalence of children with disabilities in our schools. This has not been done intensively before in Ireland. The project starts with the training of learning support teachers followed by administration of screening tests and processing of results. The report to the Department is in preparation.
Another project in which we have been involved relates to critical or traumatic incidents. NEPS provides a service to all schools - not just those on our list - that may have experienced a critical or traumatic event. This is usually provided in collaboration with the health boards. A NEPS working group has conducted an extensive literature research and has surveyed the experiences of schools and psychologists both here and in other jurisdictions. The outcome has been two resource packs, one for psychologists and one for schools, which will be disseminated early in 2004. Copies of the pack for schools are available to the committee and I hope members will find these useful.
We have given the committee details of the number of assessments and the cost of the scheme for commissioning psychological assessments. As previously mentioned, this is just for schools with no access to NEPS assessments. We consider the scheme to be an interim measure, pending the roll-out of NEPS to all schools.
We have started to engage in a process of evaluation of customer service, which has been identified as a priority strategic objective for us. Each team of psychologists has been asked to pilot an evaluation instrument each term surveying customer satisfaction. We have published our quality customer service statement and, as with all documents, this is available in both English and Irish. It is accompanied by a quality customer service action plan, which will be monitored during the coming year.
Apart from delivering a service to schools a lot of work needed to be done in drafting policies and procedures for a whole range of activities and contingencies. This has largely been done by means of internal drafting groups, that is by the psychologists themselves in addition to their work in schools. There is a wide process of consultation with all psychologists and other staff before reports are signed off. Approximately 20 substantial reports have been produced this way. We accorded high priority to this work in the early years but we are now placing less emphasis on it and concentrating almost entirely on the work in schools.
We need to continue work on planning for the move to statutory status. This is the subject of ongoing discussions between the Department and the various staff interests involved.