Importance Of School Counsellor

1.0 Introduction

School counsellors are an integral part of today’s educational system. In Malaysia, we can find counsellors all over in primary school, secondary school, college and even university. According to Prince Edward Island Department of Education (2005) ,counsellors are intended to facilitate the educational, personal, social, emotional, and career development of students in schools and in the community. As a school counsellor, they need to work with the school management in planning and implementing a school-wide counselling system. Besides, they need to provide some services like case consultations to school and parents, counselling intervention to at- risk students and deal with counselling- related issues. According to Derrick

When school counsellor needs to see students, he/she will interrupt teacher’s teaching activity with a note with little or no explanation. Thus, teachers are reluctant to send their students to school counsellor because fear of losing students’ valuable learning time.

Besides, they scare students will sometimes complain about punishment of teachers to the school counsellor. They feel counsellor will only hear half of the story. It is unfair to them. Beside that, they feel not comfortable when a counsellor enters their clasrooms to observe the behaviour of students. They are worry that their teaching methods are being evaluated.

Counsellor Y said the relationship and trust between school counsellor and teacher is very important. Every school counsellor has their counselling room but she prefers to stay at staff office to see and chat with teachers face by face rather than using phone. She will only use the counselling room when she needs to meet students or carried out counselling session. She is a good friend not only for students but also for

Teachers think that counsellor is a listener who always listen to students’ problem and work together with students to solve their problem. For the question of difference between a school teacher and a school counsellor, I found that almost every interviewees think that school counsellor need to focus on their paper works and carried out counselling session with students with discipline problem and learning problem only, while school teacher need to carry out teaching and learning activity. For the question of client of a counsellor, the same answer were giving by most of the interviewee. They think that the client is come from misbehaviour, problematic, emotional and mental problem