New Perspectives on School Counselling

The monograph entitled New Perspectives on School Counselling presents some of the theoretical and empirical analyses, looking at the school counselling service in schools and providing some recommendations for future work. The first, theoretical part of the monograph analyses the organisation and work of the counselling service in primary and secondary schools as well as the characteristics of the collaboration between school counsellors and others participating in schoolwork – headteachers, teachers, students and parents. The chapters also examine contemporary challenges, in particular emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic, met by counselling services and, more broadly, educators in educational institutions and beyond. The second part of the monograph discusses the findings of two quantitative empirical studies on the operation of the school counselling service in Slovenia. The authors emphasise that the new circumstances in schools’ and the school counselling service’s educational work necessitate a fundamental change of direction from crisis/individual responses to individual students’ problems to a developmental and preventative orientation. The conclusions from the theoretical and empirical analyses demonstrate a need for a serious reflection on and development of solutions to update both the conceptual foundations of school counselling as well as other concepts that are related to school counselling, such as the concept of inclusion, interculturalism, children’s and adolescents’ participation.