Counsellors lament uphill task impacting students with paltry numbers
Published:Saturday | December 9, 2023 | 12:11 AMAlbert Ferguson/Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
The island’s guidance counsellors are expressing frustration that they are unable to effectively help students navigate social issues and improve their general well-being because of a high counsellor-to-pupil ratio in the nation’s schools.
“We have too few counsellors with far too many children in our schools, because we are treating mental health, emotional health, spiritual and social health and you’ll find that each of them takes time, effort and planning,” Angelica Dalrymple, president of the Jamaica Association of Guidance Counsellors in Education (JAGCE), noted on Thursday.
Dalrymple was speaking with The Gleaner on the sidelines of the JAGCE’s 25th annual general conference in Montego Bay, St James. The conference was being held under the theme: ‘Guidance Counsellors: Championing Educational Success Through Psychosocial and Emotional Services’.
“For one or two counsellors to be operating in a space where you have over 1,500 students, that is counterproductive because the area of guidance alone, which requires going into the classroom to facilitate guidance, takes up a lot of time, which is essential,” she said.
Dalrymple said that while guidance counsellors are essential to the school’s support system, high or unbalanced counsellors-to-students ratios can make it difficult for guidance counsellors to effectively lead, advocate and collaborate with other key stakeholders to achieve the desired results.
“There are children with situations where you need to have one-to-one counselling sessions with,” said the JAGCE president, who is a guidance counsellor at Holy Childhood High School in St Andrew.
Although not ideal, Dalrymple said a push towards having a single counsellor not responsible for more than 200 students would be a good start, noting that there are instances of a single counsellor being responsible for several hundred pupils.
“Honestly speaking, we don’t need more than 200 children to one counsellor, and that is even too many, because you are talking about everyday intervention and you are talking about students who are in a society that is plagued with trauma from violence,” Dalrymple noted.
“Our children are so traumatised, and many of them have reached the stage of hopelessness, not only in the context that they should not be living, but hopelessness in terms of their education,” she added. “As a result, if we have more than 300 to 600 children, we are not going to be impactful.”
She noted that while there are programmes designed to reach all pupils, some might need individual sessions.
“You can’t do a programme that is not going to be incorporating all the children, and many of the programmes these days are not preventive, they are interventions, and the cases are there,” she lamented.
“If you are going to be doing preventive programmes over interventive programmes, we are losing. Therefore, we need more counsellors that we can be doing interventive and preventive,” Dalrymple added.