Assessing therapeutic outcomes of school based counselling Terry

Assessing therapeutic outcomes of school based counselling Terry Hanley Senior Lecturer in Counselling Psychology at the University of Manchester terry. hanley@manchester. ac. uk @drterryhanley @Uo. MCouns. Psych

Overview This sessions will: • Introduce what school-based counselling is • Reflect upon the evidence base for school based counselling • Consider some of the challenges associated with assessing therapeutic outcomes Also for info, it will: • Outline some useful resources

What is it? (some context)

School-based Counselling • “People become engaged in counselling when a person, occupying regularly the role of counsellor, offers and agrees explicitly to give time, attention and respect to another person, or persons, who will be temporarily in the role of the client” (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), 2002, p. 3).

Roles and responsibilities of schoolbased counsellor • Counselling is not a protected professional title • It is however “Increasingly… being reserved for the activities of professionally trained counsellors” (Cooper, 2013 p. 3) • And counsellors avoid having dual roles such as combining counselling with teaching duties • Works alongside other services such as CYP-IAPT, youth and community services etc

• “From the evidence found, it is estimated that school-based counselling is well established in 62 countries, and in the early stages of development in a further seven countries across the globe. ” (Harris, 2013, p. 1)

• In the majority of countries where counselling is mandatory, counselling is positioned at the intersection of two professions, namely education and counselling, and is delivered by experienced teachers with an additional postgraduate level qualification in guidance and counselling or school-based counselling. • In many other countries the work of the counsellor is shared between teacher-counsellors and psychologists, or less frequently, teacher-counsellors and social workers. (Harris, 2013, p. 1)

Policy and the history of schoolbased counselling Chapter Link: Policy, policy research on school-based counselling in the UK

History: pre 1960 s • Goes back to 18 th and 19 th century pastoral care systems (King, 1999) • 1913 Cyril Burt first educational psychologist • Child Guidance movement started to grow- first clinic in the UK 1927 • Despite these moves school-based counselling did not appear until the 1960 s

History: 1960 s & 1970 s • Half our Future report (Newsom, 1963) – proposed counsellors in school to support students who were deemed vulnerable to underachievement • Led to the development of training courses at Keele and Reading Universities - 1965 • Training teachers in person-centred therapy • Grew considerably and expanded throughout he 60 s and 70 s (Mabey & Sorensen, 1995)

History: 1980 s • New Conservative Government led to change in emphasis – focus upon the National Curriculum • European Community Action Programme (1985) stated guidance and counselling should be embedded into school activities • These coupled with a lack of coordination (Lang, 1999) and the economic climate led to the decline of school-based counselling

History: 1990 s and 2000 s • Resurgence – therapeutic turn in culture – The Children Act 2004 • Governmental support – Wales and NI – in all schools – England Scotland - increasing

Counselling in Schools: a blueprint (Df. E, 2015) "Our strong expectation is that over time all schools should make counselling services available to their pupils” "For schools this can result in improved attainment, attendance, reductions in behavioural problems, as well as happier, more confident and resilient pupils. ”

The proposals include: • creating a new mental health workforce of community-based mental health support teams • every school and college will be encouraged to appoint a designated lead for mental health • a new 4 -week waiting time for NHS children and young people’s mental health services to be piloted in some areas weblink to green paper

What does it looks like? (in the UK)

What does it look like? (in the UK)

Research Aims 1) How widespread counselling services in English and Scottish schools are? 2) What the key characteristics of these services are?

Prevalence • 79% schools reported having a counselling service – 80% England (514) – 73% Scotland (52)

Accounting for the silence • 85% of schools did not respond What about those who did not respond? • Reasons for this might include: – – – Inevitable part of survey research Lack of interest in the topic Some issues with medium Potential that the emails didn’t get to the right person Research fatigue in schools

• It is likely that our 79% is an over inflated figure of the amount of school counselling being offered

Follow up telephone suvey • We followed this up with a targeted telephone survey (10% of schools) • 76% response rate • 61% reported having a counselling service

Research Aims 1) How widespread counselling services in English and Scottish schools are? 2) What the key characteristics of these services are?

Characteristics • Schools generally counsellors have 2

Characteristics • Counselling Generally staff – Up to 1 day in Scotland – 2 -4 days in England availability.

Characteristics • Average number of counselling sessions per week = 5 -9

Characteristics • Service funding. Primarily: – LA funding in Scotland – School budget in England

Characteristics • Waiting time - generally up to a week

Counselling in Schools: a blueprint for the future "Our strong expectation is that over time all schools should make counselling services available to their pupils” "For schools this can result in improved attainment, attendance, reductions in behavioural problems, as well as happier, more confident and resilient pupils. ”

Evaluating school based counselling

Evaluating school based counselling NUMBERS

Counselling and Evaluation • Counselling commonly aligned to humanistic psychology – Focused upon growth – Individual’s are greater than the sum of their parts – People have choice and are intentional active agents • Thus typically there are very few evaluation studies humanistic psychology link

Therapy and Evaluation • Plenty of evaluation studies with children and young people in the broader context. E. g. : • Most reflect cognitive and behavioural interventions

(Hanley & Noble, 2017)

BACP Toolkit

Practice Based Evidence

(Taken from Hanley, Sefi & Lennie, 2011)

What is the intervention? What is it that’s being captured? What about academic attainment?

Evidence Based Practice

What is the intervention? Humanistic Therapy - Core Competencies

Feedback informed therapy

Evaluating school based counselling WORDS

• Young people, Teachers and Parents often positive about counselling in their feedback

“Before I started, I pictured those movies where you see the person lying down on a leather little recliner thing and the psychologist is sitting there and they’re not really paying attention to them and the person is just blabbing and blabbing” (Everall & Paulson, 2002, p. 81)

“jellykid 3: oh yea part my life would never been discussed if was not for online work jellykid 3: words you can’t always say face-face to people John: that makes sense do you find you talk about different stuff online to face-to-face jellykid 3: i cried online before better noone can see you jellykid 3: noone needs to know your crying and don’t know unless you say” (Hanley, 2012)

“Yeah how do you say to an [adult] ‘Hey by the way, I don’t think that’s quite right’? Yeah sometimes you should. But I’ve not got the courage to” (Gibson & Cartwright, 2013, p. 349)