Guidance counselling service ‘in worst state in history’

Guidance counselling is “on its knees”, with secondary school students missing out on crucial support services as a result, practitioners have warned.

Members of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors (IGC) are urging teacher colleagues to support motions at this week’s conferences aimed at strengthening guidance counselling and restoring ring-fenced hours for counsellors.

President of the IGC, Betty McLaughlin, said yesterday that guidance counsellors are “struggling on a daily basis to cope” since the 2012 budget, which reduced the hours provided to students in secondary schools.

“The guidance counselling service is in its worst state today in the history of education in this country, as decades of excellent work building up, developing, and enhancing the service, both by government policy and by professional qualified guidance counsellors, had been eroded,” she told colleagues in a letter.

Changes wrought by the government in 2012 have “decimated the service”, she said. “Five years on, guidance counselling is on its knees.”

She said the IGC is equally “relentless in its campaign and unwavering in its position” the next government must fully restore the dedicated guidance counselling service for Irish students, describing the policy as non-negotiable. Guidance counselling is an entitlement of all and not a luxury, she said.

“It is the role of government to support all children to achieve their potential by providing a universal entitlement to a fit-for-purpose guidance counselling support to all students who wish to avail of it, no matter what their circumstances,” said Ms McLaughlin.

Until September 2012, every guidance counsellor had ringfenced hours for the delivery of the service in schools, based on the number of students. One guidance counsellor responsible for 500 students had 22 hours per week.

This changed in Budget 2012, when the ringfenced hours were removed “with one drop of the axe, and the impact was catastrophic”, said Ms McLaughlin.

There is now a “very uneven and disjointed service”.

She cited figures published this year by the Higher Education Authority which showed that drop-out figures in many popular third-level courses are “soaring”, for example one-third of computer science students across all of the country’s institutes of technology failed to complete first year.

The children of professionals were highly likely to progress, she said, while the children of skilled manual workers were least likely, a factor that could be caused by this socio-economic class being on the margins of qualifying for grant aid.

“These students come from communities which have very little parental experience of progressing in the education system beyond second level education,” said Ms McLaughlin.

“These are the very schools which have suffered most in terms of the loss of guidance resources since 2012.

“It makes no sense either educationally or from a broader economic perspective to be denying guidance counselling services to these students, as the results of this loss will only lead to escalating drop-out rates in the future.”