Patrick M. Hughes

Guidance and Counselling in Schools

Abstract Developments in counselling over the last ten years have failed to meet the expectations of those who helped introduce counselling to British schools in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Changes contributing to the current situation are discussed: in particular, changes in the theory and practice of counselling both outside and inside the school, the expansion of pastoral-care Systems, and economic, political and other shifts of emphasis during the period. Finally, some positive proposais for the future of counselling in schools are considered.

The Child Study Movement

This chapter discusses that almost contemporaneously with the emerging “pedocentric” movement in Britain there developed a scientific attitude to the education of children and to the problems of childhood, which with the foundation of the Child Study Association in 1893 was transformed into the first organized approach to the study of children. It was this movement which led to what has constituted until recently the extent of guidance in this country as an organized system. Casual observation, intuition, faith alone as represented by the child-centered reform movement would hardly have been sufficient to bring about the profound changes which transformed the common school during the first third of the twentieth century. At the turn of the century the diagnosis and certification of mentally defective children were the exclusive concern of the school medical officers.

Discussion on Paper by John T. Salvendy

This paper reminded me of a meticulously organized coach tour of important historical sites, conducted at high speed by a polite but aloof commentator and leaving the more discerning tourist not only with an upto-date factual overview but with many unexpressed personal thoughts, feelings and queries. Ventilation of such feelings in a context from which the commentator is absent can lead to a distorted expression of the original covert reactions. My comments no doubt reflect distortion of a similar kind and, like the author’s own final summing up, may not immediately appear related to the text of the article. My reactions after the first reading formed themselves into three groupings, and remained the same through subsequent re-readings. First, the paper makes no reference to what I might call the psycho-educational aspects of training in psychotherapy. Taking into account the wide scope of Dr Salvendy’s review this suggests that the enterprise of looking at training from an educational as well as from a medical standpoint has not yet been recognized by training institutions in North America. In this respect it is heartening to note that in the Institute of Group Analysis, where training standards would undoubtedly meet with Dr Salvendy’s approval, there has been considerable awareness of such issues for some time and indeed there appears to be an increasing interest in them in more recent years. This brings me to my second response, which is that Dr Salvendy’s overview might well have benefited from a model or models capable of accommodating concepts from sources beyond both psychoanalysis and medicine. For those who have worked within it or have been influenced by it, the groupanalytic perspective will immediately present itself as a outstanding candidate for such a critical r6le. This perspective could help illuminate most of the issues raised in this paper and bring to them a realism as well as humaneness. Thirdly, I re-experienced my own antipathy to the notion that ‘scientific’ studies and ‘objective’ data therefrom will lead to the resolution of complex problems. Some of the emphases in the paper which apparently triggered off this response included references to the exclusion of unsuitable candidates through the use of psychological tests, the implied superiority of video-taping as a means of conveying the reality of group processes, and the nomination of uniform rules and even the medical model as appropriate .protectors of standards and security. While sharing Dr Salvendy’s concern about the dangers of admitting and failing to remove unsuitable candidates, I find myself in disagreement with his reasoning. A reading of the voluminous psychological literature in the use of tests for such purposes and some acquaintance with the resourcefulness of persons to dissimulate (particularly outside group situations) would

Actual and ideal work tasks of careers officers

Abstract Actual and ideal functions of careers officers as seen by professional workers in the Youth Employment Service and by students in training were investigated. An instrument – based on an American counsellor task inventory and subsequently named the Careers Officers Task Inventory (COTI) – was administered by mail to a nationally representative total sample, consisting of a random sample of careers officers (stratified by geographical region and office size), all careers officers with special responsibilities for the handicapped, and the total intake of student careers officers in Britain at the time of the survey. Negligible disparity was found between perceptions of the job as it is and as it should be. Differences between sub-samples included differing perceptions of the role of counselling. Some contrasts with parallel American findings are indicated, and questions for future research are raised.

Teaching and Evaluation

This chapter states that measurement and assessment were not considered unimportant but were firmly placed in a subsidiary position to the educability of intelligence through human experience. A striking manifestation of the contrast between the stress on examinations and the decrease in their apparent relevance can be seen in the prolonged and purposeless ritual of examining followed out by many secondary schools once or twice a year. These examination activities may occupy most of the energies of the staff and pupils for anything from two to four weeks out of the school year. Though the traumatic aspects involved in taking examinations are probably exaggerated where the majority of pupils is concerned, the overall effect of the system is to encourage parents as well as teachers to pay greater attention to examination results than to the process of education.

CHAPTER 3 – Selection and Elimination at Eleven

This chapter focuses on the fact that it is not coincidental that the present interest in guidance and counseling arose just as long-standing criticisms of selection at 11-plus had reached a critical stage. It is unlikely that either of these developments would have come about at all had there not been other changes of a more fundamental kind in society in general and in the system of education in particular. The selection examination is well described as the major act of educational guidance in Britain. This use of the term guidance in connection with the 11-plus provides a pertinent example of the very varied way in which the word is used. When the number of candidates for a position exceeds the number of places available, then a qualifying test is transformed into a competitive situation. Though correlations between 11-plus results and GCE successes are very high, it must be recognized that this is a relative level of efficiency.

The Limitations of Counselling

This chapter focuses on the fact that in a school setting, interpersonal encounters is what is meant by the familiar statement in the literature on guidance that counseling is the heart of a guidance programmed. It is especially important for a number of reasons that teachers and guidance workers in general understand the changing background against which the establishment and conduct of relationships with others and constructive positive counseling is being considered today. Clinical psychologists have been engaged in a long-standing struggle to release the practice of psychotherapy from being restricted to medically trained personnel. In the United States, where perhaps the restraints of a more conservative society have not been available to cushion the impact of the growing body of knowledge and theory about human behavior from outside psycho-analysis, entrenched opinions and authoritarian attitudes associated with psychiatry and psycho-analysis are less frequently encountered than in this country, the foster-home of psycho-analysis.

The Meaning of School Guidance

This chapter elaborates about the meaning of school guidance. Though guidance is characterized by a belief in the worth of the individual and by a deep concern for his integrity and welfare, neither guidance objectives nor guidance work in any aspect exists in a social or political vacuum. At a more profound level the political purposes of education in a society which subscribes to the value-ideal of individual freedom of choice must be antipathetic to control by coercive means. Some of the more immediate effects of the profound changes which are altering the economic structure, the social structure and the value systems of society have been with us for some time; more pupils, larger schools, an increasing range of choices of all kinds both academic and recreational, an increasing use of subject-setting, the spread of specialist teaching, fragmentation of courses, greater diversity in the curriculum, a lessening of the form teachers influence, a change of disciplinary climate even in the most sedate school settings.

Child-centred Education

This chapter elaborates about guidance itself, which is a different thing and is identified by a tradition of help and service to individual children, involving not only care for rights but also for needs. Artificial divisions were created which have distorted the thinking of many of our teachers and parents for years. The intellect was separated from the emotions by a virtually exclusive concern with cognition. The quest for uniformity and the crudities of mass instruction as well as leading to the depersonalization of teaching and to the almost total neglect of individual differences reinforced the emphasis from the industrial world outside on compulsion as the primary source of motivation. Life in the school in those early years, of course, was born of a complex conglomeration of factors, political, sociological, and psychological. Rugged individualism and an absolute dedication to independence can blind even the most liberal-minded to vital changes in society taking place around them and to the realities of social justice and responsibility in the age in which they live.

Secondary Education in Transition

This chapter elaborates about alterations in educational thinking that are scarcely comprehensible without some knowledge of the changes which have begun in Europe since the War and which have gradually transformed way of life and our ways of thinking. Demonstrations against comprehensive education, legal proceedings organized by parent groups to hold up the change-over to comprehensive education, pseudo political commentary in some newspapers, seem singularly irrelevant when set against this background. Interests, motivation, acquiring good work habits, learning how to think independently and make personal decisions, learning how to cope with personal problems and to live with others in harmony while maintaining ones independence and identity—the school in the contemporary world cannot afford to ignore or underrate these factors. Neither can the school, in coping with these tasks, afford to isolate itself either from the community, of which it is a part, or from the family, of which the child is a part.