The Regional Integrated Support for Education Northern Ireland
The Regional Integrated Support for Education Northern Ireland (RISE NI) is a Health and Social Care service, funded by the Department of Education through the Department of Health to provide direct health care assessment and clinical intervention support to mainstream schools and early child years settings
The Regional Integrated Support for Education Northern Ireland (RISE NI) is a Health and Social Care service, established in 2007 and funded by the Department of Education through the Department of Health to provide direct health care assessment and clinical intervention/ support to mainstream schools and early child years settings. In NI, five Health and Social Care Trusts (HSCT) provide health services and support in both acute and community settings. Each HSCT has a RISE NI Team comprised of Speech and Language Therapists, Occupational Therapists, Physiotherapists, Clinical Psychologists, Social Workers, Behaviour Therapists, and Therapy Assistants. RISE NI works across three levels of support: Universal (training), Targeted (small group/whole class programmes) and specialist (multidisciplinary assessment). Approximately 100 RISE team staff cover the five Health and Social Care Trusts, providing direct support for mainstream primary schools, nurseries, and playgroups in Northern Ireland, serving about 100,000 children, mainly between the ages of 3 to 8 years.
The service has two key aims:
• To reduce underachievement by optimising children’s access to learning within the educational environment.
• To foster health, well-being and social inclusion and improve the life chances of children.
RISE NI uses a Transdisciplinary model, working across professional boundaries, upskilling one another, and coordinating care plans. The model includes teachers, puts the child and family at the centre, and utilises everyone’s expertise to develop a holistic package of support.
Working with at-risk children, children with special needs, and their families is challenging in the best of circumstances. Unfortunately, preliminary evidence gathered during the COVID pandemic indicates that the adverse effects on learning, physical health and mental health have been most severe for children who are already at risk for educational disparities: students of color, students with disabilities, English learners, students from low-income households, (Colvin et al., 2021) and children with autism.