Counseling in Schools

This bibliography addresses counseling in schools involving young people up to age eighteen and excluding higher education. We acknowledge that the transition between school and higher education can be an issue, but this is not addressed in this bibliography. Counseling in schools has been occurring formally in many countries and has been present in different forms and with different time scales. In the United States, school counseling began at the beginning of the 20th century with a focus on vocational guidance, and in the United Kingdom it began in the 1960s with a very person-centered emphasis. There are different emphases and models in different countries. Counseling in schools parallels the development of counseling in general and owes much to the original thinkers and practitioners of counseling, such as Carl Rogers, but it has developed particular ways of working with children and young people and current approaches owe much to the theoreticians and practitioners who developed working through play and the arts, such as Virginia Axline. There are different theoretical stances, as in other forms of psychotherapy. Counseling is similar to psychotherapy, and there have been attempts to distinguish it from psychotherapy by emphasizing that psychotherapy is concerned with “maladaptive responses and patterns associated with psychological disorders” (see the Oxford Bibliographies article Psychotherapy for more information), while counseling is concerned with problem solving and helping clients to make positive changes to their lives. Many debate this distinction or whether there is one. The section Definitions and Concepts explores this further. Counseling as a formal process can be found in every continent of the world, and the Western models have been highly influential, although there are moves to rediscover and reclaim more indigenous forms of counseling. Counseling activities include a wide range of helping forms and have different emphases within different contexts. They include vocational counseling and guidance; psychological assessment and testing; psychotherapeutic interventions; problem solving; a curriculum element for personal social and emotional learning, or a guidance curriculum; working or liaising with parents and caretakers, and with other professionals and teachers—all focusing on the personal issues of young people. The role titles of those who work in schools vary, too, from counselor to guidance officer, guidance counselor, and psychotherapist. There has been a recent upsurge in empirical research into the nature of the approaches, the effectiveness of various interventions and approaches, the nature of the client group, and the outcomes of counseling in schools.