School guidance counsellors attack dilution of role
Eilis Coakley, president of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors, will tell colleagues at their annual conference that their professional role is being eroded at a time when there has never been more demand for guidance services.
“It is being dismantled in a piecemeal fashion until we become invisible,” Ms Coakley said.
She said the role has been diminished by the use of outside counsellors ahead of qualified guidance counsellors. She said schools should use any extra resources to appoint those suitably qualified.
“We witness mental health initiatives coming into schools without any reference to the existing support services or structures,” she added.
Each second-level school must have 500 students or more to appoint a full-time guidance counsellor but this ratio was one for every 250 students up to the 1980s.
A recent ESRI report based on research with more than 500 parents of second-level students found almost one-in-four were not satisfied with guidance, mainly because they want more provision particularly to help students with subject choices.
Ms Coakley said that the role of guidance counsellors is unique in the advice and support they provide, not just on educational and career matters, but also on personal and social issue.
She said they also offer an holistic approach which facilitates people throughout their lives to manage their own educational, training, occupational, personal, social and life choices so they reach their full potential and contribute to the development of a better society.
“We are particularly present to people at periods of major transition in their lives, to young people as they negotiate developmental milestones and adults, many of whom are forced to make transitions they never contemplated having to make as a result of economic fallout,” she says.
She will highlight these important roles at the annual conference of the IGC in Limerick today, but will also raise concerns about what she sees as disturbing developments of guidance services being tendered for through the Department of Education’s Labour Market Activation Fund. A number of courses offered to unemployed people through the fund offer career coaching, but Ms Coakley says some of the services had no knowledge of the Irish education system.
“Once again, professional guidance services in adult guidance in education, FÁS and community sectors were ignored and a real opportunity was lost to give people desperate for guidance a real chance to move on,” she says.
