The Barnardo's NI regional 'Time 4 Me' service has provided professional counselling to primary school pupils for over 17 years but will sadly close in June 2024. In the absence of sustainable funding, Barnardo's has had to use its charitable resources, alongside substantial resources from schools' squeezed budgets. That has become no longer sustainable. The charity has long warned government officials that, without adequate funding for mental health support in schools, vital services like 'Time 4 Me' would close, leaving children with no access to a service.

Over the past 17 years, the 'Time 4 Me' service has worked in around 70 primary schools across all school sectors, supporting nearly 3,000 pupils through the delivery of 30,000 sessions of counselling and therapy.

The service uses a child-centred approach that incorporates a whole-school approach to well-being and has prioritised work in the most disadvantaged areas of Northern Ireland. The results of the service speak for themselves. In 2022-23, 81% of children who attended the service were described as being in clinical distress at the outset but in the normal range at the end of their access to the service.

Child and adolescent mental health services are under severe pressure in Northern Ireland. Resources targeted at mental health and well-being support, including access to counselling services in schools, are a vital tool in easing the pressure on those services by getting help to children when they need it, making support as accessible as possible and preventing initial mental health concerns from becoming a crisis that needs longer-term health service intervention. The loss of the service will, of course, impact the children who rely on it now, but we must note the wider problem that that speaks to. The Health Minister and the Education Minister need to prioritise providing secure and stable funding for vital mental health early intervention work with our primary-school children. Healthy Happy Minds funding was pulled with little warning or planning last year. Schools can simply no longer afford to use their already inadequate budgets to do that early intervention work on behalf of Departments.