Detrimental effects of cutbacks to guidance counselling highlighted

Guidance counsellors say the loss of up to 11 hours per week of one-to-one supports for students due to cutbacks must be addressed following a number of suicides and incidents of self-harm.

That is the average counselling time lost in secondary schools that have responded to an audit on the effects of staffing cuts from this year.

Gardaí are investigating bullying messages left for a 15-year-old-girl, before she took her own life in Co Leitrim last week, on the ask.fm website. The anonymous posts form part of inquiries following the death of Ciara Pugsley.

A secondary school in Co Wexford was given 11 extra teaching hours last week by the Department of Education as a short- term concession.

This has allowed it to restore guidance hours after a student could not see the counsellor who was timetabled to teach.

The teenager was later hospitalised but has since returned to school.

The cutbacks bring counselling hours into overall teacher allocations, forcing schools to cut guidance hours, drop subjects, mix students of different levels, or a combination of all three.

However, preliminary findings of an Institute of Guidance Counsellors (IGC) survey, completed by one-in-three schools, show the average amount of time available for counselling has halved.

The IGC said it made no sense to put counsellors into classrooms when their skills were urgently needed.

A spokesperson for the Department of Education said schools must continue to offer guidance and it was confident schools would act in the students’ best interests when deciding how to use resources available to them.