Your education questions answered
In your column recently you referred to the fact that all schools have an allocation of guidance and counselling hours. My daughter is a third-year student in a voluntary secondary school and has had little guidance and counselling in her first three years. The school has over 400 students and has a guidance counsellor. In fact the guidance counsellor was my daughter's religion teacher in second year. How can students be expected to understand the world of work and make informed subject choices for the Leaving Certificate without proper guidance and counselling prior to the Junior Cert?
Prior to 1983 the Department of Education provided every 250 students with a guidance counsellor. Due to severe economic conditions at the time, the allocation of guidance and counselling to schools was cut in half. This cut has never been reversed. The consequence of that cutback was that guidance and counselling became mainly confined to a personal counselling service provided to students in need and a careers service available to students in the Leaving Certificate cycle.
All students entering secondary school are assessed by a guidance counsellor to determine their mathematical and verbal skills. Your daughter will also be administered a set of aptitude tests to determine her intellectual strengths and weaknesses prior to making the Leaving Certificate choices you refer to in your question. I accept that these two interventions are no substitute for a proper ongoing guidance and counselling service, which she is entitled to under the Education Act 1998.
Where the number of students in a school falls below 500, the guidance counsellor is only permitted to spend half his/her working week in guidance and counselling. They are obliged under the regulations to spend the remaining time as a classroom subject teacher. This is a deeply frustrating experience for most guidance counsellors.
In the present situation, where due to falling enrolments in secondary schools caused by a decrease in the birth rate in the 1980's, many schools similar to your daughter's have less than 500 students. There is a guidance counsellor in the school, who if allowed, could provide junior as well as senior cycle pupils with appropriate guidance and counselling.
A further irony is that due to the fact that numbers of students attending secondary schools are falling faster than teachers are retiring, many schools have a surplus of teachers over and above the numbers provided for under the Department of Education and Science regulations.
It seems ridiculous to me that there are highly qualified guidance counsellors, forced to spend half their working week, subject teaching, when the school already has a surplus of subject teachers.
If Minister Dempsey were to provide a guidance counsellor for every 250 students in the system, the existing guidance counsellors would be able to provide the service. Most schools would be half a teacher less over their allocation than they currently are. There would be no additional cost to either the Government or the taxpayer resulting from this doubling of the service in such schools.
Brian Mooney is president of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors. You can e-mail him your questions to bmooney@irish-times.ie
