Young people’s perspectives on school counselling

Abstract

While school counselling is well established in secondary schools in Aotearoa New Zealand, there have been few resources available to establish a complementary research base. This article reports on a small survey study that investigated the perspectives of young people who had used school counselling services during the two weeks of the online survey. The survey replicated one strategy employed within a much larger evaluation study of the counselling services in three schools in Glasgow, Scotland. In focusing on only one research strategy—student self-report via survey—the study makes a small contribution to discussion of evaluation practices for school guidance counselling in New Zealand. As in the larger Glasgow study, young people in the small sample in this study evaluated school counselling as helpful across a number of dimensions of their lives.