Counseling and Guidance in Schools

Developing Policy and Practice

Colleen McLaughlin, Meryl Chisholm, Pam Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138164307
• eBook ISBN: 9781134090532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 1996. This book aims to help teachers and others working in and with schools to explore the development of counselling and guidance. The authors have used their experience of development work in one school - Ramsey Abbey School, Cambridgeshire - as a basis for exploring the concerns and issues raised by teachers, students, and governors. The book aims to clarify some of the queries as well as report their findings.

CHAPTER 1

Counselling and Guidance in Schools – A Map of the Territory

Colleen McLaughlin

This chapter contains: a definition of terms; an exploration of the place and importance of counselling and guidance in schools; a discussion about the need to consider teachers’ and students’ views; an outline of what the terrain may look like to anyone engaged in developing counselling and guidance in schools; and the issues that may arise. This overview will be developed in Chapter 4, ‘Critical Issues in the Field’, where the issues will be explored in more depth.

What is meant by counselling and guidance?

There has been much discussion about the role and nature of counselling and guidance in schools (for example cf. Hamblin, 1993; Bovair and McLaughlin, 1993; HMI/DES 1990). I have argued elsewhere (Bovair and McLaughlin, 1993) that counselling has three aspects: an educative element, a reflective element and a welfare element. These elements were defined thus:

Schools have a responsibility to develop students personally and socially, so there is an educative function. However, personal and social development do not take place in isolation. Our personal development and sense of identity are learned in our interactions with others. We learn who we are in the context of a community and those in it. Therefore, there is also the responsibility to explore the impact of the school or college on the personal and social development of the students there. This reflective or evaluative function involves exploring the possible impact of and contribution to personal and social development of practices in the classroom and other aspects of the school community. This generally incorporates interactions between students and teachers as well as between students and students. It also includes wider issues of teaching and learning styles, classroom and school climate. In addition, there is the welfare function: the responsibility to plan for and react to issues which impact on students’ welfare and development. (McLaughlin, 1993, p.40)

In this work we are focusing on the welfare and reflective aspects of counselling and guidance in schools.

The welfare and reflective elements require more explanation. The objectives in this area are, as Hamblin (1974) states:

• to aid students in decision making and problem-solving

• to support students in a constructive manner at times of difficulty

• to monitor and detect students who are at risk or under pressure

• to react in an appropriate fashion

• to co-ordinate work within and outside the school.

Activities will include counselling when it is sought by students, more focused guidance activities such as that involved in decision making of a predictable kind; counselling to react to a crisis, problems and transitions; and more specialist counselling. It also involves liaising with outside agencies and parents. There is an assumption that all teachers are involved in the use of counselling skills and this will be discussed further in this section.

We are primarily concerned in this work with the one-to-one interactions between student and teacher as well as the processes and structures in schools that support or interfere with that. This necessitates an involvement in the processes of teacher and system development, e.g. evaluation and research, teacher support and training, consultation and negotiation.

Why explore this territory?

Counselling skills for all

The history of counselling in schools is one of a transition from an expert model to a skills model. Previously there were specialist counsellors in schools, many of whom had received specialist training. This is still the case, but to a very limited extent. Now it is seen that counselling skills are a necessary part of every teacher’s repertoire. Hamblin wrote in 1974 ‘Counselling is a necessity, but counsellors are not.’ In 1993 he added, ‘Counselling skills are vital, … they are an integral part of many roles.’ He went on to argue that, ‘counselling is only effective when it is part of the everyday life of the school’ (Hamblin, 1993). Therefore, this is an aspect of whole school policy and development. All teachers are engaged in using counselling skills and so this is a key area to focus on in schools. There has been much writing about this field and much advocacy. However, systematic attempts to explore the difficulties for and views of teachers and students are less visible. The work undertaken in one school has shown that it is important and productive to do so. We would argue that there is a need to look at the reality of counselling in schools and to explore the views of teachers and students as we did.

Teachers’ concerns

The development of counselling from an expert to a counselling skills for all model raises many complexities for teachers. HMI (DES, 1990) in their survey of guidance in schools found that ‘schools and colleges had a variety of approaches to guidance’. This is not unwelcome or necessarily problematic; however, these differences were often symptomatic of confusion about the role, purposes and management of counselling in schools and colleges: ‘This could easily be related to the absence of explicit aims, of clearly identified elements of guidance provision and of evaluation outcomes’ (DES, 1990). This signals the complexity of working in this field and there are many confusions in the mind of teachers. Our research, which is reported more fully in Chapter 3, shows that teachers are confused and concerned about many aspects of working one-to-one with students and I shall detail the main concerns of those involved in a later section of this chapter.

Some of the fears of the teachers arise from the recent political debate in this field. Counselling pupils and certain aspects of pastoral work and sex education have become controversial. Teachers are frightened of ‘doing the wrong thing’ and many have real but unfounded fears of what can happen to them if they ‘do the wrong thing’. Our research showed that teachers’ confidence regarding counselling and advising students had been damaged. This is a recent development and is a result of the controversies and debate regarding what teachers should do. Many were reluctant to intervene because they feared the consequences. Many were very unclear about their roles and the limits of their activities. There is a tension between the concerns of many teachers – to deal professionally and humanely with the issues students bring to them as effectively as possible – and the concerns of some policy makers, who appear to want to limit the activities of teachers or push for a particular model of helping or personal and social development. Circulars from the Department for Education on Sex Education have been hotly debated. The Times Educational Supplement on 28 October, 1994, in an article entitled ‘Sex secrets advice disputed’, shows the tone of recent debates that have fuelled teachers’ fears. The article was referring to Circular 5/94 (DfE, 1994). The TES article says:

Controversial advice that teachers who are told a pupil is having under-age sex must inform parents or the head teacher, has been questioned by a leading barrister. … Particular fears were expressed over sections suggesting that pupils should not be given individual contraceptive advice, and that pupil confidences must be relayed to the head teacher or parents.

There is much current debate about the rights of parents, the rights of students and the rights of teacher. These different rights are not always in harmony with each other. The lack of clarity about the teacher’s role in this field is not new. The Elton Report, Discipline in Schools (DES, 1989) commented on the lack of definition of terms such as ‘in loco parentis’.

Teachers in our study lacked confidence in this sphere of operations and welcomed the opportunities to clarify their concerns. There was clear evidence to show that opportunities for discussion, gaining information and other training activities helped the teachers to feel more confident. This is now an area of work in which teachers and governors feel ambiguous and often fearful.

The need to listen to students

There is a large amount of evidence that listening to the voice of students in schools is meaningful, productive and is not done enough. Paul Cooper studied a group of boys placed in residential settings. He focused on the school experience as perceived by these students. Cooper’s aim was to understand the mechanisms operating in schools which created and exacerbated problem behaviour. He concluded:

One of the great sources of knowledge about schools is to be found in pupil accounts of their experience … in isolation from pupils staff can set up systems and procedures; they can develop measures to assess outcomes, but they cannot explore what it feels like to be on the receiving end of their actions. Only pupils can provide this expert testimony.
(Cooper, 1993, p.247)

OFSTED have also acknowledged this by including discussions with pupils in the data collection process for inspections (OFSTED, 1995). A recent report by Schreuders and Bell (1993) reported the findings of asking a group of seven students to put together their own report with recommendations for a better school system. At the top of their recommendations to improve the experience of schooling they placed more respect from and communication with teachers. This they felt would improve teacher/pupil relationships at all levels. Second, they wanted more opportunity for pupils to discuss their views with each other and teachers in order for changes to benefit them. Third came the request for counselling to be made available to all to meet their needs for advice and support, separate from the processes of discipline and monitoring academic progress.

This small-scale study mirrored the findings of Charlton and David’s (1990) summary of the key factors identified through research on what it is in schools that makes a difference to outcomes related to pupil disaffection. The conclusion is that there is a need for schools to create an ethos which acknowledges the worth of each student as an individual, by respecting their opinion and encouraging their involvement. It is the interaction between the students, teachers and the system which makes for effective schooling. In Pam Clark’s study of students’ views in two schools (Clark, 1995) she found that students wanted teachers to help them with inschool issues not, as the teachers thought, only to focus on out-of-school issues. There is a fuller discussion of this in Chapter 3.

Jean Rudduck’s study also reflects these themes (Rudduck et al., 1995). She and her colleagues argue that their interviews with students demonstrate that students have a contribution to make to school improvement. She details the lack of research into the students’ perspective on schools per se. She reflects on current studies and concludes:

Some take into account the inferred experience of pupils and represent it in the researcher’s construction of the situation: others provide commentaries which are the direct and deliberate result of consulting pupils about their experiences and seek to bring their authentic voices into the discourse of strategic planning.

From the interviews Rudduck et al. conducted they conclude:

Our broad summary of what pupils have told us in interview is that while teachers are for the most part supportive, stimulating and selfless in the hours they put in to help young people, the conditions of learning that are common across secondary schools do not adequately take account of the social maturity of young people, nor of the tensions and pressures they feel as they struggle to reconcile the demands of their social and personal lives with the development of their identity as learners.
(Rudduck et al., 1995)

Students’ concerns

There is also much evidence to show that students desire to talk to teachers but are also unclear about the boundaries, especially the limits of confidentiality. White (1995) summarises various recent studies in the field of confidentiality:

• ‘Eighty four per cent of 13–15 year olds would find it helpful to talk to a teacher but only 31% would do so if it were not confidential...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Counselling and Guidance in Schools – A Map of the Territory
• 2. The Process of Developing Practice and Policy in a School
• 3. Viewpoints – Students and Teachers
• 4. Critical Issues in the Field
• References
• Subject Index
• Name Index