Comments on Guidance Counselling in Ireland
On Wednesday (December 31st) the Irish Times letters page carried an article that was highly critical of the current practice of guidance counselling in Ireland.
Some points made were
- that the guidance counsellor model for secondary schools is a relic of a simpler time
- school based guidance counsellors should deal exclusively with vocational matters
- it is an impossible dual-purpose role
- reform is no longer optional: it is a matter of student safety
The following is a reply from Brian Mooney published in the letter page of Saturdays edition of the Irish Times on 3rd Jan.
I commend your letter writer Sean Keavney (December 31st) in highlighting the shortage of 300 educational psychologists from the National Educational Psychological Service (NEPS) to meet the European average.
They are acutely needed to assess the growing numbers of children in our schools who need special needs support in mainstream classes or access to special classes. As educational psychologists, they are experts in their field. What they are not are clinical psychologists and never under any circumstances engage in personal counselling in schools.
This may seem odd to most people, who regularly hear the sentence following the announcement of some occurrence relating to a school going student whose life has ended tragically, that NEPS psychologists are supporting the school.
Their role under these circumstances is to advise school management relating to dealing with media, planning activities within the school to allow the students to come to terms with the occurrence, speaking with staff who are supporting the students in their interactions. What they never do is engage one to one with students.
The teaching staff who know the children better than anyone and particularly the guidance counsellor, and in many such cases, guidance counsellors from neighbouring schools, are the ones who support students through such tragedies.
Where I completely disagree with your letter writer is in his suggestion that guidance counsellors cease to deal holistically with the 12–19-year-old students sitting in front of them and try to deal exclusively with their vocational aspirations.
The essence of postgraduate guidance counselling education is the acquisition of counselling skills for use in an educational context. Factual educational and vocational information is readily available on a wide range of websites from Qualifax, CAO, Careersportal, Solas, Eunicas, UCAS; the list is endless.
The guidance counsellors' job is to disseminate this information in a classroom to up to thirty students, GC’s are all qualified teachers after all, and to use their counselling skills in their one-to-one interactions with individual students in their office to help them apply the knowledge communicated in a classroom context to their own lives.
In the privacy of that confidential interaction students often reveal deeply personal or family circumstances which are having a significant effect on their current educational performance and or their capacity to realistically explore their ongoing career/academic journey.
Using their professional judgement, they can use their counselling skills to deal with the challenge confronting the student themself or decide to refer the student, using the designated school procedures onto the Child and Adult Mental Health Services (CAMHS), TUSLA in the case of child protection concerns, or the child's GP through a recommendation to a parent etc. The GC may also brief, where appropriate, class tutors or year heads who are dealing with the child daily, to increase the support for the child within the school.
Your letter writer is critical of the GC engaging in such referrals. Is this not exactly what every GP does daily following interactions with their patients?
Ethically, no counsellor, whether in a school or other context, engages in ongoing counselling without professional “counselling supervision”. The Department of Education and Youth has funded the delivery of six, two hour supervision sessions from September for every CG working in any publicly funded educational institution for over twenty years now, to ensure the highest quality of guidance counselling possible.
To suggest that this entire profession of guidance counselling be pared back to disseminating information on vocational options and somehow embed educational psychologists, who have more than enough work to be doing conducting educational assessment, in schools, is not helpful to either profession.
Brian Mooney
Education Columnist
