School counselling is developing rapidly in many countries around the World. As with any practice in a secondary setting, challenges and special issues are often identified, discussed, and managed. These can be categorized into four distinct domains: 1) Internal challenges, which include issues related to clientele groups, teachers' attitudes towards counselling, and students' willingness to seek counseling; 2) External challenges, which refer to social-economic changes beyond the school. These include popular culture, globalization and societal trends of more families and students moving across borders; 3) Systems challenges, which are those within the guidance programmes implemented by ministries, schools or counselling bodies. These issues may reside in the guidelines for practice in schools, referral procedures, and resource planning; 4) Personal challenges, which relate to the needs as well as the skills of the counsellor. Some examples here are training, supervision, and attitudes towards school systems. The four domains and interactions among them are discussed in this paper.

This article reports on a qualitative study that set out to understand stakeholders' perception of the school counselling service in Singapore. Using semistructured interviews, this study explored the perceptions of three main stakeholder groups, namely teachers and counsellors working within the schools and those working in the communities. Altogether, 19 interviews were conducted. Two key theme areas were uncovered. First, the stakeholders observed and expected differing levels of confidentiality for information obtained during counselling. This presented a barrier for cooperation between the stakeholders. Second, stakeholders, while keen to ensure students' families were served appropriately, held different ideas of how that could happen. No clear model of collaboration seemed to exist at the time of the study. Implications for practice were discussed.

BackgroundChildren and young refugees often experience negative events that affect their mental health. Their caregivers may also be in the same predicament, implying that the teachers in schools are a potential source of help and support. However, most teachers have little understanding of mental health and are, thus, clueless in helping their students. To address this need, a newly developed one-day mental health literacy programme was conducted among 68 refugee teachers in Malaysia.MethodsParticipants learned the symptoms of mental health issues among children and adolescents in the context of post-trauma, provision of early intervention, and channel for professional supports. They also answered a packet of measurements of mental health literacy before and after the programme.ResultsThe paired sample t-test showed that participants reported higher willingness to contact with people having mental health problems (t = 2.787, P = 0.008, Cohen’s d = 0.394), less stereotypes toward mental illness (t = 4.603, P < 0.001, d = 0.651) and a better understanding of self-help strategies (t = 2.16, P = .036, d = 0.322) than baseline.ConclusionThe results of this study offered preliminary empirical evidence on the effectiveness of the programme as a promising channel for alleviating mental health issues among refugees.

Over the last decade, the movement towards the permanent presence of counsellors within schools has gathered pace in Singapore. As counsellors were introduced into more schools, there were opportunities for their community-based counterparts such as social workers, youth workers and other counselling practitioners to work with them. Through semi-structured interviews, this study explored the experiences and perceptions of counselling practitioners in community-based agencies, specifically Family Service Centres, on school counselling. Community counsellors were found to be supportive of the initiative but concerned about how the service was implemented, especially in relation to professional and ethical standards and maintenance of confidentiality standards. Community counsellors felt that their counterparts in schools lacked knowledge about community resources and that family work seemed beyond their capability, they also thought that former teachers or principals perhaps needed more help with the transition to a counselling role. These findings are discussed and it is recommended that community counsellors could be more involved in developing the new school counselling services.The influence of sociocultural factors on child development was established in the classic studies of Bronfenbrenner (1979), andSuper andHarkness (1986). Evidence for the importance of the relationship between psychological and sociocultural factors is accumulating, and further research is needed to improve our understanding of human development in different sociocultural contexts (Hwang, 2005). Hendrick's (1997) study of how changes in the UK's education system influenced child development in that country showed how investigating changes in school environments and their effects on stakeholders can help to improve our understanding of child development. This paper describes qualitative research on community counsellors' attitudes and opinions of counselling practice in Singapore schools.Many Asian countries-including the southeast Asian country of Singapore-are already investing or face calls to invest more, in the psychosocial care of children and young adults in the school system (

With the growing diversity of professions working in schools, interdisciplinary partnership and collaboration are growing quickly the world over. Apart from traditional teaching and learning concerns, awareness of children and youth mental health issues and socio-emotional wellbeing, grew readily since the 2000s. Rising in tandem with this trend is the number of psychologists, social workers, and counselors joining educators to support children and young persons in schools. Challenges such as misconception of roles, differing perceptions as well as cross-disciplinary misunderstanding threaten to prevent concerned professionals in working collaborative to help children and young persons in need. Fortunately, this aspect of interdisciplinary partnership in schools gains the much-needed attention in research from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and the Americas. Models and frameworks suggesting best practices for interdisciplinary collaboration emerged in school psychology, counseling and social work literature. Also growing in tandem is research in methods of measurement and evaluation of such collaboration as well as studies on pre-service professional training on interdisciplinary collaborative skills in the related disciplines.