A Change in Focus... Without Losing Sight of the Child

Abstract

Due to the influence of family therapy, ecological and systems theory approaches, there has been an increasing tendency within school psychology to shift the focus of attention from the individual problem child to the child's environment (mainly the school and family) and to place the main emphasis upon prevention. The paper questions the legitimacy and expediency of this change in focus and examines consequences for school psychology as a profession. A newly developed taxonomic model provides an overview of various school psychological activities, and some basic structural and process phenomena observed in the school psychological context are described and analysed using systems and communications theory. Based on these, eight statements put forward the view that school psychology should in the future continue to attend to both problem-oriented individual casework and preventive and context-related tasks. This polyvalent orientation requires us to formulate new professional guidelines for school psychologists as 'successive generalists', who see professional learning as a life-long process and change the focus of their activities during the course of their professional development.