Do welfare counsellors help at-risk upper secondary school students?

Social Inclusion of Students from Disadvantaged Backgrounds: New Strategic Approaches to Educational Counselling and Communication

“…-the studies highlight and confirm the need for an increased need for counselling for students in general, and for disadvantaged students in particular, whichever subgroup they belong to, for a wide variety of needs and demands: psychological, financial counselling (Silva-Laya et al, 2020); academic or those related to career decision (Reiling et al, 2022;Pietrzyk & Melinda, 2020). Even if during the pandemic period the education systems initiated online counselling solutions, for the disadvantaged students the inequalities became more pronounced, they could benefit from these solutions much less or not at all than their peers, in the absence of the necessary infrastructure, online learning devices and/or adult support;…”

“…This huge current responsibility of educational institutions leads to an increase in the usefulness of counselling services and centres in preuniversity (Reiling et al, 2022) and university education (Fortes et al, 2022;Vostanis & Bell, 2020) -which have become integral to student success and functioning‖ (Bell et al, 2021, p. 4). Although humanity has returned to face-to-face learning and seems to be reintroducing the former normality, online communication and counselling will nevertheless remain in the post-COVID period as a variant of activity, with all the forms known and validated in the pandemic period (Linder et al, 2022).…”

“…For example, the peace circles method (Parker & Bickmore, 2020) can be successfully used in group counselling to educate the ability to overcome conflict situations that may arise due to the students' very different backgrounds; -an effective post-COVID solution is crystallising, one which combines online and face-to-face approaches, not only for psychological reasons but also for technical ones, in order to ensure -that students are not ‗left behind' by a lack of access to particular formats‖ (Jones et al, 2021, p. 2). The studies propose sets of measures which combine different perspectives, allowing the expression of vulnerability and self, -that help to traverse the ‗us versus them'‖ (Leonardelli, 2022, p. 8); -a systemic, holistic, coherent and flexible approach to counselling (-we cannot act alone‖) is required (Vostanis & Bell, 2020, p. 392) (Fortes et al, 2022;Themelis & Tuck, 2022;Dawkins, 2021;Zain, 2021), in which counsellors work in partnership with schools/teachers (Yada et al, 2021), families (Lohndorf et al, 2021;Silva-Laya et al, 2020;Vinas -Forcade et al, 2019), with social workers (Linder et al, 2022), with the local community (Reiling et al, 2022;Silva-Laya et al, 2020), with other educational, national and international organizations, with employers and different stakeholders (Vostanis & Bell, 2020) to strengthen their competences -in a caring and collaborative context‖ (Jonsson & Goicolea, 2020).…”