How COBIS is championing high school counsellors

One of the main challenges faced by the school counsellor profession is raising the profile of their roles and building a network, in what can often be a fairly isolated job. Often the counselling remit is added to the workload of a subject teacher or a head of sixth form, or the counsellor is relegated to an end-of-corridor office and isn’t given the time and support to thrive in their role.

This is one of the challenges that the Council for International British Schools (COBIS) has identified through its engagement with school counsellors and why it decided to sign a three-year strategic partnership with THE Counsellor to support thousands of students at British international schools around the world to get the best possible advice around university selection.

COBIS is a member association of international British schools overseas.

“In the last 18 months to two years, COBIS has put a real focus on supporting and developing school counsellors because we recognise that we could and should be doing more for that specific segment of valuable and important members of the school workforce,” said Colin Bell, the organisation’s CEO.

The first part of the strategy was to run an in-depth survey with school counsellors to identify how the profession works and the challenges it faces. This survey showed that there were some gaps in terms of training and understanding global choice in higher education.

As a result, COBIS ran a series of sessions called ConnectED sessions, which facilitated discussions with school counsellors and provided a forum for counsellors to share resources, talk about the challenges facing their profession and build a professional network.

Mr Bell said that much of the feedback COBIS received from counsellors was about the “power of the network” – having a group of counsellors and like-minded colleagues to be able to bounce ideas off. This is something that COBIS will continue to facilitate and work towards building through partnerships such as the one with THE Counsellor. 

Counsellors are some of the most crucial members of the schooling team when it comes to advising students on their paths after school, Mr Bell agreed. As someone who regularly meets with senior leadership teams in schools globally, Mr Bell had some tips on how counsellors can work with their management teams to ensure they are given the opportunity to take part in professional development and boost their profiles. 

He said that counsellors could always call on COBIS and its data to back up how valuable counsellors are for developing students and helping them make informed choices on their universities and future plans.

“Sometimes a counsellor’s role is a bit of a mystery, so it’s about raising the profile of what a counsellor does – this includes providing case studies [about where students and alumni have gone after school] and celebrating the successes of students,” he said.

Mr Bell also noted that one of the key strengths of counsellors was that they could decipher complex information about visas and applications, and could disseminate any changes to these processes to their students in an easy-to-understand format.

“Schools will always talk about the successes of their students and how many ended up studying abroad and at which universities. Getting all of these successes included in school prospectuses and brochures will show the end point of the time schools spend in advising their students on their university choices,” he said.

Mr Bell added that counsellors could present these case studies and statistics to their senior leadership teams to prove just how effective their conversations with the students are in informing these choices.

Another thing that counsellors could do to raise the profile of their roles in their schools, said Mr Bell, was to run sessions during inset days explaining what their roles were and how other members of staff could support them.

Counsellors can also speak to senior leadership teams to ensure that they are part of the overall school development plan so that senior leaders and governors are held accountable for including school counsellors in the general infrastructure of the school.