Counselling with a holistic approach at schools- Balancing child’s academic and life skills (Part 1.2)

- Children are an important part of the citizenry, and education plays an important role to develop productive citizens. Education aims at the overall development of children. Any education system should cater to the development of body, heart, mind and soul. Through this, we can truly achieve holistic growth.

For child’s education and development, teachers play an important role at school, and parents play an important role at home. In addition to the teacher and parent support, there is an upcoming need and trend of counselling at school. It is mandatory to have a counsellor in school as per CBSE board (As per referred in 2015). With regards to the student counselling, the counsellors work closely with the teacher as well as parents.

A six-week study in Mysore city of Karnataka India was undertaken to see how the professional counselling practices are helping students in issues like academic, behavioural, personal life, career planning and so on. Counselling provides crucial scaffolding for a child’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. Counselling does not mean only one to one support, or supporting students only during the times when students’ problem and behavioural issues arise. When we mean school counselling system, it comes with varied programs, it consists of proactive, preventive as well as reactive actions (Refer part 1.1 of the series for details related to facets of counselling).

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Education counselling aims at making learning a joyful experience for children. To do the study we consciously selected schools which have counsellors and schools which do not have counsellors. We found very practical issues with regards to counselling in India, there is a lot of stigma about counselling. From the individual interviews, we found that participants from both, schools with counsellors and schools without counsellors were of the opinion that having a counsellor in a school is very helpful.

In one school in addition to a counsellor, a dedicated special educator is also appointed. We found that there are a lot of lapses in counselling practices like there are no planned one to one sessions which is mandated by CBSE. And also we found that many school stakeholders have the potential to be like a counsellor- stakeholders like teachers, parents, and principals. And one aspect which came out very clear is that only a counsellor alone cannot achieve the outcome, the counsellor should work closely with all the stakeholders, to make counselling to be a holistic approach.

This is part of Children's mental health and wellbeing series brought to you by Credence Learning Foundation.

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