As schools reopen in the UK, so the commentary on what’s best for our children begins again. The measures to mitigate the spread of COVID that were in place last academic year have been lifted and the jury is out on vaccination for 12- to 15-year-olds. There is no certainty – again -  about the way that GCSEs and A levels will be assessed, beyond a general hope that things will return to normal.  With uncertainty about physical safety and academic assessment, children’s and young people’s emotional and psychological wellbeing will be debated, as it was during the periods of lockdown and, indeed, before the pandemic. The children of the UK have risen high in the ranks of the world’s unhappy in recent years. Schools are often cited as both the cause of and balm for children’s emotional difficulties: the fallout of high stakes assessment methods and toxic peer relationships (exacerbated by social media) can be met with in house specialist provision, met by school budgets.

It is tempting to regard interest in school children’s ‘wellbeing’ as a recent phenomenon, and as one of many new demands placed on schools. However, school counsellors have been present (on and off) in the UK’s schools since the mid-1960s, which came as a surprise to me as there was no evidence of their existence when I was at comprehensive school in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As I discovered in my research, my time at secondary school coincided with a downturn in the fortunes of school counsellors. The number and nature of school counsellors has changed in line with shifts in education policy, school funding models and child protection legislation. That is, it is not our changing understanding of children’s therapeutic needs that seems to determine whether school-based counsellors are in or out of favour but the dominant structure of secondary education and broader legislation about children’s rights.

When school counsellors were first trained and appointed in UK secondary schools (from 1965), their role was influenced by ‘vocational guidance’ and mental health movements from the US and the UK. The UK’s vocational guidance movement had been established at the beginning of the twentieth century and formalised by the Employment and Training Act of 1948 and the establishment of the Youth Employment Service, which gave careers advice to school leavers. Hans Hoxter (the German Jewish refugee who is credited with establishing the counselling movement in the UK and) had worked for the Youth Employment Service and could see that it wasn’t meeting the needs of the young people he supported after the war. Hoxter set up one of the first training courses for school counsellors at Keele University. A less likely key figure in the history of school counselling was Bob Cant, Labour leader of Stoke’s Education Committee. Cant had visited the United States in the early 1960s and seen first-hand the kind of support that was being offered to high school students there by ‘counselors’. Hoxter and Cant weren’t just drawing on the American models though. Like vocational guidance, mental health provision for children and young people had been offered by the state since the early twentieth century. The child psychologist, Cyril Burt, was appointed in 1913 by London County Councill to advise teachers and parents supporting elementary school children. Child guidance clinics (run by medical services) were stablished in 1921 for children in mainstream schools whose behaviour and conduct were ‘challenging’.

The creation of the National Association for Mental Health after the second world war and the Mental Health Act of 1959 led to greater understanding of the needs for specialized mental health support for adults and children. The Association’s 1963 conference in Bristol explored the merits of school counsellors in UK schools; in the same year, the Newsom Report recommended the introduction of school counsellors in secondary schools to support the needs of the overlooked ‘half’ of the school population (those not in grammar schools nor on the bottom rung of the educational ladder).  The post-war popularity of child-centred educational methods, and broad political assent for support for the ‘whole child’, set the scene for the introduction of specialised members of school staff to attend to the emotional as well as academic and vocational needs of secondary school children.

The first school counsellors were teachers with at least five years’ experience, who were selected by their local education authorities for additional training. Over time, vocational guidance seems to have detached itself from the role of school counsellors who became associated with person-centred, humanistic personal therapy for children, influenced by the American psychologist and pedagogue Carl Rogers. One of those early teacher-counsellors. Alick Holden, comments in the introduction to his book on the subject that the students who came to see him ‘were not given careers advice, psychological tests, psychiatric treatment or forms to complete’ but a ‘relationship’ with an established member of teaching staff who could quickly respond to their needs (Teachers as Counsellors, 1969). He goes on, however, to elucidate the tensions between offering authority and unconditional acceptance, providing direction and client-centred empathy in a way that justifies the eventual separation of the roles of teacher and counsellor.

Various commentators have charted the ‘rise and fall’ of the popularity for counselling in state schools between its inception in 1965 and the early 1980s, when school counsellors virtually disappeared. This shift has been attributed to changes in funding models, the promotion of pastoral care integrated into teaching roles and suspicion of ‘American’ child-centred models of therapy and pedagogy (all issues which are alive and well in current education debate). Despite some resistance along these lines, school-based counselling has re-emerged since the 1990s, partly due to an increased emphasis on the rights of children after the 1989 Children Act and the devolution of school budgets with the 1988 Education Reform Act. After the Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié and the 2004 Children Act, school counsellors were additional weapons in schools’ child protection armoury.

There is no UK-wide strategy for counselling in schools, however.  England, unlike the devolved nations, has not committed to counsellors in all state secondary schools, despite apparent political consensus that many young people are struggling with their mental health.  Research led by Professor of counselling psychology, Mick Cooper, has responded to demands for evidence that school-based counselling works and is good value for money. Cooper’s team found that most school counselling is humanistic in its orientation (harking back to the child-centred tradition of its origins) and valued most by young clients for the provision of a judgement free relationship in the pressured environment of the contemporary secondary school.

While school counselling was ‘revived’ once it was not controlled by local education authorities, it has suffered from the same fragmentation that the whole education sector has experienced along with its apparent ‘freedoms’. There is no common core training for school counsellors, although there are some training courses dedicated to school counselling.  My training was an addition to my general counselling and psychotherapy diploma, provided by the charity Place2be, with an emphasis on attachment theories, play therapy, safeguarding and child protection. I supplement this training with my own choice of CPD. There is no formal distinction between my work as a young person’s counsellor outside of school and the work I have done as a school counsellor, even though the work is informed by the context in which it takes place. My understanding of school structures gleaned from my experience as a school governor has stood me in good stead here.  In some schools, counsellors are overseen by the safeguarding team; in others, they are part of the Special Educational Needs department. Some are part of an integrated team, offering group work and staff training as well as one to one sessions, while some work largely independently in an anonymised room, as though conducting dark arts. It is quite tricky to assess the impact of school counsellors (and thus justify their employment) when their roles vary so much from school to school.

As I’ve investigated the history of school counselling in the UK, it has come to seem that the status of school counsellors at any given time and in any given school (here, an unnecessary extravagance, there a key worker) is a barometer of the broader health, coherence, and optimism of the education sector rather than a measure of the needs of young people. It is not a coincidence that counsellors were first introduced into secondary schools at the same time as comprehensive schools became the preferred model of state education in England and Wales. It was the belief of the 1965 Labour Education Secretary Tony Crosland that the selective system set up after the war was disproportionately benefiting middle class children and that the creation of a unified, non-selective system would lead to great equality in educational outcomes. School counselling was introduced in a similar spirit, because its founders understood that all young people required more than academic and vocational support. Just as the ‘comprehensive project’ is yet incomplete and in fact comes under frequent attack, so the promise of all secondaries having staff whose attention is exclusively on the emotional and relational needs of students (and staff) is never quite realised. Although the early days of the pandemic offered the possibility of new priorities in our schools, this autumn’s return is already burdened by many competing agendas around Covid, assessment and an often medicalised narrative about school children’s mental health. With so much noise around what’s best for our children as they return to school, it’ll be remarkable if those quiet canaries, the school-based counsellors, will be heard even if they start coughing.

Sources:

Cooper, ‘School-based counselling: A review of the evidence’, University of Roehampton (2016)

Gayle, ‘Children in England near bottom in international happiness table’, The Guardian (February 2016)

Holden, Teachers as Counsellors (1969)

Milner, Counselling in Education (1974)

Pearce, Sewell and Cromarty, ‘School and Education Settings’, The Handbook of Counselling Children and Young People (2015)

Robinson, ‘School Counsellors in England and Wales, 1965-1995: a Flawed Innovation?’ Pastoral Care (September 1996)