School counsellors

As an association representing a profession working with children in schools, MACP (the Malta Association for the Counselling Profession) cannot but concur fully with Mr Tony Mifsud (The Sunday Times, March 11) that personal and social problems in Maltese families can be identified more easily in schools by trained and committed teams of professionals.

Mr Mifsud however, fails to mention school counsellors among the list of professionals who should form part of this team. We'd like to believe this omission was a slip of the pen, for indeed school counsellors have long offered an excellent service within our educational system. This in spite of the fact that they themselves are overloaded with work and the number of counsellors within schools, especially in the primary sector, is definitely not enough to give the adequate ongoing service they would like. The majority of Gozitan primary schools for instance almost lack the services of counsellors altogether.

Apart from individual and group counselling sessions, school counsellors liaise with different caring professions and agencies, attend case conferences when needed and hold meetings with parents and teachers.

They also need to reflect and decide on the ideal way of proceeding according to the case. All this without supervision offered from the Division.

With regard to training, once again we fully agree with Mr Mifsud that professionals working in this field need to be trained. MACP organises training weeks annually where foreign professionals are invited to give workshops and national conferences on various relevant topics not only to counsellors but to all those in the caring professions.