Counselling, Guidance and Clinical Services: “A Therapeutic Pastime For An Age Of Leisure”?

Abstract

Doctors and lawyers have been part of modern Western societies for hundreds of years. But educational psychologists are a much more recent phenomenon in the professions, tracing as they do their heritage only from 1913, when Sir Cyril Burt was appointed by the London County Council as the first educational psychologist in the world! One can only describe the history of such a profession as revolutionary — not evolutionary — since over that 70 years, educational psychologists have come to be employed by every local education authority in Britain and likewise in large numbers in Australia.In the Education Department of Victoria educational psychologists are employed under the title of Guidance Officers, a rather interesting title. The Counselling Guidance and Clinical Services Branch of the Victorian Education Department is the largest employer of psychologists in Australia: a close estimate suggests some 326 work in this service. The total staff is over 600 and includes social workers, welfare officers, interpreters, speech therapists and a large secretarial, clerical and typist force. In the U.K. with a population of over 56 million and an estimated school age population of 8 million, only 1,300 educational psychologists are employed by the local education authorities.The comparison between Britain and Victoria in the numbers of educational psychologists employed relative to the number of school children in the two countries is instructive. Victoria has less than 450,000 school age children; it employs over 300 CG & CS officers. This gives a ratio of educational psychologists to schoolchildren of approximately 1:1380 compared to 1:6154 in the U.K. Thus schoolchildren in Victoria would appear to require almost five times as many educational psychologists as the schoolchildren in Britain. Or is it as simple as that? Is the high ratio of educational psychologists in Victoria a reflection of the real needs of Victorian schoolchildren or is it a reflection of the interests (and I use that term in a political self-interest sense) of educational psychologists?