Counselling in Schools - A Reader

Keith Bovair, Colleen McLaughlin

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138179592
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134084654
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 1994. Keith Bovair is currently Headteacher at Durants School, Enfield. He was formerly a lecturer at the University of Birmingham. He has worked extensively in the field of special education in the United Kingdom and in the United States of America. He has published widely in this area. Colleen McLaughlin is Tutor in Personal and Social Education at the University of Cambridge Institute of Education, where she runs courses in counselling and personal and social education.

Chapter 1
An Overview of Counselling in Britain Today

Brigid Proctor

In this chapter Brigid Proctor gives a comprehensive overview of counselling in Britain in the 1990s, including a description of the explosion of interest in this field. She explores the assumptions and values underlying the practice of counselling, as well as the different uses of counselling and counselling skills. She describes attempts at collective self-discipline in the counselling world and the political and economic context. Finally, she looks briefly at patterns emerging from the overview, including a discussion of the work of the British Association for Counselling.

An overview objectifies. It encourages looking down from a distance. It removes you from the messiness of personal experience, human interaction, organisational and institutional politics, social privilege and deprivation, It sociologises political and economic passion; philosophical and ideological angst; professional rivalry, achievement or failure; spiritual fulfilment or malaise.

In contrast, the activity of counselling has developed in a subjective way. It is usually undertaken by people who are enmeshed in all that messiness. Often they feel passionately about the need for enabling help to be available to those in distress. They have clear and urgent views of the disabling nature of many of our social institutions and practices. 'Counselling' has been more a movement than a practice, developing haphazardly in response to need or where individuals and groups have been moved or inspired by ideas or beliefs. Such differing inspiration has often meant that it has been hard for those people to talk to each other as allies rather than as rivals. In addition, by its nature, 'counselling' has been counter-cultural. Any attempt to look and plan objectively for the provision of counselling on a wide scale has usually been made at the time and expense of the counsellors. They have seldom if ever (except perhaps in relation to AIDS and HIV) had the economic and political clout or backing to carry plans forward in a single sector, let alone across sectors. So an overview will be difficult to offer and may, perhaps, be misleading. Nor will my overview be objective. I have views, thoughts, feelings, doubts, satisfactions and biases which will inevitably influence my picture of the counselling scene.

Dissemination and professionalisation

As a counselling skills trainer, I have been energetically associated with what I would call the disseminating and empowering sector of the counselling movement. Having trained and worked in social work, I have always known that counselling as a structured opportunity for one person to be helped by another was available for very few people. My enthusiasm has gone into sharing counselling ideas and practice with people who, in their day-to-day work, can offer a facilitative relationship to very many people undergoing transitions and crises. I believed that most people had some capacity to be enabling for others, and that they could develop those skills and attitudes with systematic help. Through those years, I came to realise that our culture has been dismal in developing our ability for 'helpful' responses, and that the hierarchical nature of our social relationships is very insidious. In other words, a lot of unlearning needed to happen in counselling skills training. My faith that very many people are potentially able to be more helpful to others at times of choice, change, confusion or distress was justified.

Throughout 17 years as a trainer, I had been involved with the British Association for Counselling. On retiring early, I spent three years as Chair of the BAC Training Committee, where I had the opportunity, with others, to think about the wider issues of counselling training. Also, as part of my freelance practice, in partnership, I developed training for counselling supervisors, and for supervisors of those using counselling skills in their work. In these roles, I was engaged with the more professionalising arm of the movement. I came, rather reluctantly, to acknowledge that the counselling world had to take responsibility for its own standards of practice. Reluctantly, because I understand the process of professionalisation to be unintentionally alienating. In working to live creatively with this tension - the value of 'skills for all' within a framework of responsible thought and practice; alongside increasing counsellor regulation - I feel like a 'counselling system' in microcosm.

So, bearing in mind the haphazard picture, and my own involvements, I have chosen to concentrate, in this personal overview, on:

• the explosion of interest in counselling; both on the part of the general public and 'human service professionals';
• the assumptions and values underlying the practice of counselling;
• counselling and counselling skills - definitions and distinctions;
• the growth of collective self-discipline in the counselling world;
• politics and economics - the changing pattern of counselling provision;
• a brief, fresh look at patterns emerging from this overview.

1 The explosion of interest in counselling

The public

In the last twenty years, the attitude of the general public to counselling and psychotherapy has changed dramatically. In the 1970s most people connected the 'need for counselling' with failure, and mental illness. Alternatively, it smacked of American self-indulgence and navel gazing. Now, radio, television and the agony aunts all publicise counselling as a useful resource. Newspapers, and even Which?, survey different kinds of therapeutic help and occasionally warn against it. Disaster reporting is accompanied by requests for, or reports of, counselling support for survivors and relatives. The increase of telephone help-lines is largely welcomed by press and public.

All this marks a cultural shift in attitudes to dependency and independence; and in the delineation of failure and non-coping. It also marks an acceptance that people can no longer rely on the extended family and familiar community in times of crisis or distress. In acknowledging that vacuum, it seems less bizarre that people should turn to informed strangers for help - among others 'the counsellors'.

The shift has been supported by a new language that makes it seem acceptable to suffer psychologically. The minting of the word 'stress' to cover all sorts of behaviour which would formerly have been called weakness, break down, nerves, and so on, has enabled some people to relate less judgmentally to their own and other people's emotional and social difficulties. By the emphasis on stress and tension as the interaction of physiology and environment, there is a lifting of personal blame which formerly prevented the more puritanical among us from acknowledging the fear or actuality of not coping well enough. 'Being stressed' brought personal and social difficulties out of the realm of psychiatry as surely as some of the former clinical language of counsellors and psychotherapists had sealed it in.

In parallel, the alternative health movement has stressed the holistic nature of body/mind/spirit health or malaise. This movement seems to have tapped our culture's more romantic/existential aspirations in a way that counselling and psychotherapy on their own could not. In an unpublished paper, Lago (1991) quotes an anthropological 'healing quadrant' (Tseng and Hu, 1979) incorporating four modes of healing which it is suggested are available in all societies. (Figure 1.1)

Figure 1.1 An anthropological healing quadrant (after Tseng and Hu, 1979)

Perhaps the current call for counselling bespeaks the hunger for being in a 'moving' and significant dialogue. In addition, counsellors are aware of hopes and expectations of magical, or spiritual release; and tread the boundary between the medicinal and the behavioural and dialogue modes, all of which may fall within their sphere.

Human service professionals

Those who work in what could broadly be called the 'human services' now recognise that there is an activity called counselling; that there are associated communication skills which can be named counselling skills. And they want them. Such professionals are realising that

• interpersonal skills
• self-awareness;
• an understanding of the dynamics of personal change, and
• a framework for thinking about social systems

were largely lacking in their own training.

Moreover, the increased stress under which such workers find themselves leads them to hope that somewhere there is a less stressed corner where, as at least a temporary 'counsellor', they can offer individuals or groups some asylum from intolerable pressures. People who are called counsellors, health professionals or clergy are not alone in the healing quadrant. More people are helped and healed by chance or regular encounters with a loving teacher or wise manager than ever 'go for counselling'.

This is an impressionistic analysis, but the explosion of counselling courses is real. From short introductory counselling skills courses through to MAs and MScs in Counselling or Counselling Psychology, they proliferate yearly. Demand matches provision, and applicants come from every corner of the education, health and social services; from the voluntary sector, the churches and, increasingly, from the personnel and management sectors of business and industry.

2 The assumptions and values underlying counselling practice

Thumbnail history

The skills and awareness which are taught under the name of 'counselling' are based on a comprehensive set of assumptions and values. These are not exclusive to 'the counselling movement', but are shared by many people in their day-to-day lives, both private and professional. They are basically humanistic, and fall into the category of romantic rather than puritan. However, the counselling movement has been responsible for working those values and assumptions into an increasingly coherent practice based on ever more clearly defined skills and attitudes.

Counselling was first heard of in Britain in the 1950s, the National Marriage Guidance Council probably offering the first regular practitioners. Psychotherapy was already well-known. Stemming from the psychoanalysis of Freud and his early colleagues, it was based on European values and experience. It would be a caricature to sketch these as resulting in a practice which was somewhat introverted, hierarchical, and pessimistic/depressive in style - but not a totally unrecognisable caricature. For the most part, it was viewed by professionals and public alike as somewhat marginal and mystical, and it required a long and expensive training. (However, it was a powerful 'aunt Sally' and behavioural and humanistic psychology derived a lot of energy from being 'anti psychoanalysis'.)

Social casework, the predecessor of counselling in the social work field, was derived directly from psychodynamic principles. It was available for the socially disabled, as psychotherapy was mostly for the 'sick'. Some social work training included many of the elements now offered in counselling training, but it was available to social work trainees only.

However, it took two largely American imports to fuel the explosion of response to 'counselling'. One was successive packages of varied humanistic psychotherapies. To caricature these would be to sketch them as extrovert, democratic/charismatic and optimistic/manic. The other was the import of a practice developed out of mainstream academic psychology, which was first purely behavioural, but which is developing into cognitive/behavioural/emotive counselling or therapy. A caricature of that practice might depict pragmatism, relentless realism, and didactic cheerfulness.

Shared legacy

So what are the shared values and assumptions in a counselling movement fed by such diverse tributaries? Put simply, the basic proposition might be that it is difficult for children, and subsequently adults, to be themselves. They may not act in ways that meet their fundamental needs, and they may not know how to. One way these needs have been described is:

• to love and be loved;
• to feel powerful for oneself and others and to be able to enjoy proper dependence;
• to be creative and to participate socially with others in creative activity.

Caretakers of children have themselves often been imbued with limited or even mistaken ideas about these needs. They may have had to deny some or all of them for themselves. They therefore pass on strategies and provide environments that encourage 'fitting in'. It is desirable for children to be able to relate with and respond to their changing environments - personal, social, physical - purposefully and flexibly. However, an anxious preoccupation with 'fitting in' exacts a cost. Children may lose the freedom to explore ways of developing emotionally, physically, socially and spiritually within their own sense of the world and with their own unique resourcefulness.

This freedom is best experienced when children feel sufficiently loved and valued, and when they can recognise clear and consistent enough edges to their freedom - realistic boundaries and expectations. This self-regarding development provides the sense of worth which makes for loving and being loved. It builds a realistic sense of personal power which allows the child to relax into compliance and dependence, without fearing loss of control or identity. It nurtures the unquenchable creativity of the child, and seems to encourage the ability to enjoy and care about other people if 'cultural messages' suggest this as a value.

The young of any species are hardy and determined, and most parents are, in Winnicot's (1965) description 'good enough'. Most children survive in Britain at present, both physically and with some sense of personal identity. Often they do so using stress-driven strategies that are relatively inflexible. That is, they are motivated by, for example, the need to reduce fear or anxiety, or to avoid a sense of shame, impotence or rage. At times of choice and change in their lives they may have difficulty knowing where to look, or what to do, or how to make sense of the situation they find themselves in. At times of added difficulty which causes them distress or confusion, they may easily find themselves (or tell themselves that they are) unable to cope. The sensations and emotions they experience may be overwhelming and, since as children these responses may have been discouraged, they 'don't know what to do with themselves'.

The counselling process and ethos presumes that if, at that stage, some person who is not over-involved in the outcome of the situation can be at hand, they can be helpful. Counsellors believe that such help needs to provide the kind of facilitative environment which children needed in the first place to survive and flourish. To quote from a paper produced by BAC with the aim of influencing professional bodies in the human service arena:

People thrive best when they are respected and personally understood; and when they are treated genuinely and encouraged to respond similarly.

We also assume that they have the right and responsibility to engage actively in the processes of their own personal, social and educational development; in the maintenance of their own health and in the amelioration of their own illness or disability.

Carl Rogers (1961) suggested that such a 'not overinvolved person' (or facilitator) needed to offer:

• unconditional respect;
• non-possessive warmth;
• genuineness;
• a continuous and visible (or audible!) engagment with the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 An Overview of Counselling in Britain
• 2 Counselling in the Primary School: an Integrated Approach
• 3 Counselling in a Secondary Setting - Developing Policy and Practice
• 4 Counselling in Special Education
• 5 Counselling Abused Children in Schools
• 6 Putting Problems in Context - the Family and the School
• 7 Developing Self-Esteem
• 8 Peer Support Groups and Whole School Development
• Index