Promote or Perish: Ensuring the Survival of Guidance Counsellors

Abstract

During consecutive terms as President of the Queensland Guidance and Counselling Association, the first author routinely made public addresses where the survival and promotion of the Counselling profession was explored. Following such speeches, Guidance Counsellors would typically tell stories about the poor regard with which their role was held within their system and asked what they could do to increase their identity, profile and status. The second author, in eighteen years as a Guidance Officer in a different state, also came to learn that embedded within such interactions and questions were anxieties about job security and concerns about the public perception of the relative professional value of our role. It would be possible to write a paper that reflected that gloom, but we decided it would be timely and more useful to consider what could be done to increase the likelihood of professional survival.

In addition to the climate existing in the world of Guidance, we are aware of the advent of Nurse Counsellors, Behaviour Teachers, Pastoral Carers, Home-School Liaison Officers, School-based Police, Chaplains and Welfare Workers within the education context. It has been the placement of these additional personnel within schools which has added to the unease of Guidance Counsellors, with what many believe is usurping some of the their role.