School Counsellors Working with Young People and Staff

A Whole-School Approach

Nick Luxmoore

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781849054607
• eBook ISBN: 9780857008381
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Counseling

What is it like to work as a counsellor in schools? What relationship might a counsellor have with staff? How can a counsellor become a positive, integral part of school life?

In this book, Nick Luxmoore shows how school counsellors can make a positive difference to the whole life of the school. Rather than being a service hidden behind closed doors, he shows how to take a whole-school approach to counselling, making it a normal part of school life. The book demonstrates how staff as well as students can benefit from counselling, and how professional boundaries and relationships can be maintained. Key therapeutic aims and how to develop the service are also covered.

Drawing on over 26 years' experience as a school counsellor, Luxmoore combines vivid case material with psychotherapeutic theory to show counsellors how to provide an excellent service and make a positive contribution to the school. The book will be essential reading for school counsellors, headteachers, teachers, and anyone interested in effective counselling in schools.

1

INTRODUCTION

‘So you’re the counsellor then? I don’t think we’ve had one of them before. Or if we have, I’ve never seen them! Anyway, pleased to meet you. I can think of a few of our youngsters who’ll be coming your way. In fact, there are probably a few members of staff who could do with your services as well. No, only joking! I don’t suppose you’re allowed to do counselling for staff, are you?’

This book describes why and how the processes and understandings of counselling will be at the heart of any good school. Working with others, counsellors can help to develop cultures in which young people and staff feel more confident and valued than they would otherwise feel and, of course, when people feel confident and valued, they not only lead happier lives but also tend to do better academically.

There are a few training courses for counsellors wanting to work with young people, but I know of only one training course specifically for counsellors wanting to work with schools. Instead, school counsellors have to learn on the job, adapting whatever they’ve learned from other contexts. I’ve worked for more than 26 years as a school counsellor with young people aged 11–18 and with staff aged 22–65. It’s been a privilege but, as this book describes, there have been important lessons to learn. So I’m always delighted when I hear that a school has decided to appoint a counsellor, but then I get nervous, worrying about how the counsellor will interpret the brief. Will he or she work with the whole institution as well as with individuals, making counselling and the understandings of counselling available to everyone? Or will this particular counsellor choose to remain mysterious and peripheral, narrowly involved in the life of the school, afraid of breaking some imaginary rule whereby counsellors must keep themselves apart? Will counselling in this school come to be seen as shameful and secretive, available only to the weird and the weak? Or will people start to feel that the service is for everyone because counselling is fast becoming a normal part of school life, with everybody starting to think that they might become quite good counsellors themselves? There are wonderfully creative opportunities for counsellors to make a difference in schools. But there are dangers.

Different schools expect different things from the person they call the counsellor. In some parts of the world, the ‘counsellor’ is the person offering ‘guidance’. In others, the ‘counsellor’ helps out with a tutorial programme or with outdoor activities, helps young people with learning difficulties or provides careers advice. This is all good work but you don’t need to be trained as a counsellor to do these things: teachers can do them perfectly well. Instead, this book is about school counsellors as therapists, taking account of a person’s external circumstances but aiming, ultimately, to work with a person’s internal world, a world of unconscious defences holding anxieties at bay. It’s a book about what goes on in the privacy of the counselling room; about what helps and hinders the therapeutic process.

But it’s also about what goes on outside that room because, as Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 describe, school counselling relationships are inseparable from their context: the individual and the group are interdependent. Foulkes (1948) writes that ‘Each individual – itself an artificial, though plausible, abstraction – is basically and centrally determined, inevitably, by the world in which he lives, by the community, the group, of which he forms a part’ (p.10). So whenever young people are complaining of bullying, for example, that bullying will usually be an expression of group as well as individual anxieties: anxieties about difference, intelligence, strength, attractiveness. Whenever sexual teasing between individuals is rife, there’s likely to be a general anxiety in the corridors and staffroom about sex and sexuality. And there’ll be plenty of other anxieties in the institutional mix as well – anxieties about status, aloneness, visibility, power, failure, success – with some individuals having what Bion (1961) calls a ‘valency’, an aptitude for unwittingly picking up and expressing these anxieties on behalf of others as well as themselves. ‘The individual identity of each one of us’, writes Pines (1998), ‘is constituted by intrapsychic, interpersonal and transpersonal processes; the boundaries of the individual extend far beyond those of the corporeal self’ (p.25).

In this sense, young people and staff come to counselling on behalf of the school as well as themselves. They come with a sense of what’s fair and unfair, of belonging and not belonging, of feeling looked after and not looked after. They bring the issues preoccupying the school: a disparate collection of individuals all worried about fairness, belonging and being looked after. Young people’s anxieties will reflect and express the anxieties of staff. For example, there’s likely to be a lot of anger enacted by students if the staffroom is full of unexpressed anger. There’s likely to be a lot of self-harming amongst students if teachers are scared and unsure how to respond to self-harming. And through the wonders of projective identification, members of staff will, in turn, tend to pick up and express the anxieties of students, feeling angry and unloved, burdened with other people’s expectations and, at the end of another long day, worried about the future themselves.

Hinshelwood (2001) writes that because the prevailing culture of the institution affects the individual, ‘that culture should itself be a part of the therapeutic investigation’ (p.54). I agree. A school counsellor needs to be paying attention to and trying to affect whatever’s happening at an institutional as well as individual level, not least because a young person’s experience of living for seven hours a day in an institution that supports or ignores, values or scorns him will be as powerfully therapeutic or anti-therapeutic as any work going on behind the closed doors of a counselling room. Lanyado (2004) writes that ‘the therapeutic environment in which the therapy sessions themselves take place is as important in facilitating change as the other tools in the therapist’s clinical bag’ (p.57). Winnicott (1975) goes further, describing how, for some young people, the environment or ‘placement’ in which they find themselves is more important than their work with a therapist.

Because of this, a counsellor needs to be out and about, saying hello to people, taking the institutional temperature and having an effect on it. As a school counsellor, my own repertoire of involvements beyond the counselling room has included organising sex education (Luxmoore 2010), running groups (Luxmoore 2000, 2002, 2008), developing student consultation, supervising and training staff, managing peer support schemes (Luxmoore 2000, 2002), recruiting and supervising volunteer counsellors and running workshops for parents. Whatever their effectiveness, these involvements have been intended to have a positive effect on the school culture, assuaging anxieties and thereby lessening the damaging impact of those anxieties on individuals.

Young people dread being shamed, so when their trust has been abused at home or at school, they’re understandably wary of trusting anyone associated with home or with school. They might be prepared to talk with a counsellor, but if the prevailing school culture decrees that counselling is for ‘weirdos’, ‘psychos’ or ‘people with problems’, then doing so will require courage and secrecy because of the threat of other people finding out. Young people might put some trust in a counsellor but only on condition that he or she has nothing to do with their parents, teachers or peers. Perhaps with situations like these in mind, McGinnis and Jenkins (2011) write that ‘A counsellor can be very effective working with the pastoral support structure of a school but it is often the “independent” nature of the service that gives pupils confidence in having counselling with someone who does not play a part in the rest of their school life’ (p.16).

This is problematic. In schools where there’s little or no personal safety and feelings are seen as weaknesses to be mocked, keeping the counselling service ‘independent’ may be a necessary short-term measure to protect young people whose trust has been abused. But in the long-term, the service has to become integrated into the school as a whole in order to change the culture. Like any other school department, the counselling service will always need a degree of independence but, in the long run, it’ll be doing nobody any favours if it sets out to be independent, determinedly apart from mainstream school life. Where people are mocked for using the counselling service, the counsellor has to set about changing the way people think about counselling by demystifying the service (see Chapter 3), putting it at the heart of school life rather than allowing it to remain marginalised, the object of everyone’s hostile projections.

Perhaps in the belief that being ‘independent’ is the name of the game, there are some school counsellors who remain deliberately aloof, the door firmly shut, believing that confidentiality will inevitably be compromised if they’re seen talking with teachers in the corridor or joining in with normal school activities. The implication of this is that confidentiality is such a brittle thing that a counsellor would only have to meet a teacher in the corridor to find herself telling all! There’s also the implication that teachers are untrustworthy and incapable of supporting distressed students themselves when, in fact, most teachers do this on a daily basis and with far more students than a counsellor will ever meet.

Confidentiality matters, but remaining aloof and refusing to engage with these issues doesn’t help. If some teachers are less respectful of confidentiality than they should be, then they’ll only get better at managing confidentiality by coming into contact with a counsellor who maintains a normally interactive relationship with them in the corridor while keeping confidential all the things that need to be kept confidential. Perpetuating a split in young people’s minds between ‘those who can be trusted’ and ‘those who can’t be trusted’ is unhelpful. The fact is that we tell different people different things. As Chapter 5 describes, it’s perfectly possible for confidentiality to be maintained and for a counsellor to be talking (and seen to be talking) with all sorts of other professionals.

This book is also a way of talking with other professionals and confidentiality is therefore an issue. For fear of jeopardising my clients’ confidentiality, I could decide to include no case material in the book and stick to dry theorising, but then the danger would be of readers getting no sense of what the work actually feels like. So there has to be a way forward. Faced with the problem, Marzillier (2010) writes: ‘I made a decision to…create a disguise, a fiction from the raw material of fact. In this way, the people [in my book] are all real but the account I give of them and of their therapy has been fictionalized’ (p.xvi). I like this; so, in the same way, all the people, conversations and dilemmas in this book are true and untrue. The details are all changed – no one would recognise themselves – and in that sense, they’re untrue, but the spirit of each person and each situation is completely true.

Along with concerns about confidentiality, it’s also argued sometimes that leaving the safety of the counselling room and being seen around school – no longer a blank screen – skews a client’s transference to the counsellor; that knowing her outside the counselling room stops young people projecting unconscious material onto the counsellor. Clearly, working with young people in a school isn’t the same as working with fee-paying adults in thrice-weekly Kleinian psychoanalysis. However psychoanalytically trained a counsellor may be, the rules of that training have to be adapted considerably to work in a school. School counselling isn’t private practice. The counsellor doesn’t happen to be working in a school, seeing a few people in secret and then going away again. Being a school counsellor is about working on many different levels at the same time. Young people have to learn about different kinds of privacy (Luxmoore 2000), about having one kind of conversation in the counselling room, another in the canteen, another in the classroom. They have to learn that adults are multi-faceted: listening intently in the counselling room, eating food and chatting in the canteen, insisting on rules in the classroom. And they have to learn that this is normal: no one’s pretending or playing a game; people are never just one thing.

So this book is about the counsellor as a visible presence in a school, known by everybody and contributing to the life of a school in many different ways. Of course, that contribution will be constrained by whether the counsellor is full- or (sometimes very) part-time. But the principle remains the same. The mysterious presences hiding themselves away on the sidelines in the name of ‘confidentiality’ and ‘independence’ risk losing their jobs if nobody knows what it is that they do or, even, who they are. When budgets have to be cut, it’s much easier to cut the job you know nothing about, the person you’ve never met. Peripatetic counsellors are also likely to be at a disadvantage, coming into school from an agency once a week, forever seen as outsiders, rarely able to affect the quality of relationships in the school because they don’t belong to the staffroom and are distanced – most importantly – from the headteacher.

Getting a counselling service started in a school is hard work. I’ve met counsellors who complain indignantly that their school doesn’t take counselling seriously, that they’re marginalised or ignored, that the room they’ve been given is a cupboard under the stairs with paper-thin walls and no heating. I know that this happens and that it makes life difficult but, at the same time, why should a school respect and value someone just because they call themselves a counsellor? Or because they happen to have a qualification? Or because they say that they’re good at listening? The only way to get respect in a school is by being relentlessly reliable over a long period of time, by appreciating and never undermining staff, by intervening to stop the fight in the corridor, by helping out when the reception area floods and piles of documents have to be rescued, by re-decorating the cupboard under the stairs, making it colourful and cosy and, above all, by doing really excellent work inside it.

I’ve interviewed many kind, warm-hearted counsellors wanting to work in schools. Without exception, they pride themselves on their ability to listen and empathise, which is fine, except that everybody in the school – receptionists, caretakers and canteen staff, to say nothing of teachers and teaching assistants – will also be priding themselves on these abilities. In fact, they’ll be taking these abilities for granted.

‘What do you see as the difference between listening and counselling?’ we ask at interview.

‘Well, a counsellor is trained,’ says the counsellor, ‘trained to listen.’

‘But so is everyone at this school!’ blurts the headteacher.

‘Yes,’ says the counsellor, ‘but do they listen to people’s feelings?’

‘Not always,’ she replies, ‘and that’s because of time, because they’re busy. They want to listen to people’s feelings!’

‘Feelings about families?’

‘Naturally!’ she says, irritated. ‘My staff are perfectly well aware that people’s feelings about their families are important. I want to know, what will you be doing as a counsellor that’s different from what the rest of my staff are already doing?’

The question has to be answered. Listening and empathising matter, of course they do. One of the tasks for any counsellor is to bear witness to another person’s experience – accepting it, respecting it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• By the Same Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part One: The Context
• Part Two: The Therapy
• Part Three: Developing The Service
• Part Four: Life After School Counselling
• References