Counselling Services
ISHR’s counsellors work closely with teachers and parents to ensure that ISHR’s students are supported. Any student may approach the counsellors during the school day or contact them to make an appointment. The school counsellors will provide the student with opportunities to work through his or her concerns in a non-judgmental, caring and understanding environment. The counsellors also offer preventative programs to address school-wide needs across the sections. Our counselling services aim to assist students who are experiencing difficulties which may interfere with their academic, personal, social or family life. A wide range of services and interventions are available to assist in addressing problems or concerns like student behavior, relationships, separation/divorce, bullying, friendship problems, alcohol/drugs, stress, illness or bereavement.
Our Services
At ISHR we seek to be a listening school. This means that we promote active listening by all staff and foster an environment where every child has at least one member of staff who they feel comfortable talking to. This is normally their advisor. To further promote this, we provide two Counsellors who are able to support the students on a more professional level. Whilst we do not provide licensed psychological therapy, we do offer more specialised support that is influenced by a number of fields including Social Work and Humanistic Counselling. We offer counselling to all students at lunchtime drop-ins and on a more regular basis to those identified through a referral system (see the Whole School Support Policy for more information on this).
The counselling we provide is based on a short term model of intervention that seeks to create capacity not dependency. This means that each case is reviewed after 6 to 8 weeks (often much more regularly) to ensure that the counselling we are providing is meeting the needs of the child or young person. Where the student needs more longer term, therapeutic support, we will refer to an outside agency as detailed in Section 19 of our policy.
What a student tells the counsellor stays confidential. This means that the Counsellor does not share this information with anyone else. The only exception to this is when what is shared presents the student or another person at risk of harm, then, as in accordance with our Child Safeguarding Handbook, we would work with the Child Protection Team to support the student in question.
