A myriad of challenges awaits school counsellors inside today’s classrooms: students struggle with their mental health; have experienced trauma, bullying, or social isolation; and carry devices that sap their ability to focus, interact with peers in age-appropriate ways, and pay attention in class. Teachers, too, are increasingly feeling the heat with rising workplace demands combined with diminishing resources equating to higher stress and burnout within a reality of underfunded and decaying investment in public education. Within this environment, fostering student and community wellbeing has become a critical priority for K-12 school leadership with counsellor social-emotional knowledge and expertise central to fostering positive outcomes in schools. Yet, despite this reality, school counsellors are lacking in number in our schools and are frequently “on the outside looking in” when it comes to important areas of school operations such as discipline, planning and organization, policy development, and community engagement. School counsellors are underutilized as leaders, and this must change if schools are to meet today’s complex challenges.
The state of mental health in schools today is not what it used to be. Compared with previous generations, Generation Z as a cohort is more likely to have the following characteristics related to mental health: increased depression and anxiety; external locus of control, loneliness, and pessimism; and a lower level of overall physical activity (Twenge, 2023), with researchers continuing to see the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth wellbeing (Pfefferbaum, 2021). In statistics that serve as an indictment of the challenging climate of K-12 education today, findings from Statistics Canada’s longitudinal component of the 2023 Canadian Health Survey on Children and Youth paint a bleak and worsening picture of youth mental health in Canada, with a quarter of survey respondents that said that their mental health was “good” in 2019 no longer felt that way by 2023, and girls rating their mental health as “fair” or “poor” at twice the rate of boys. Moreover, in a finding about the impact of schooling on students, the report noted that optimism about schooling declined as a student progressed through school, with increased pessimism negatively correlated to mental health (Statistics Canada, 2024).
Not only are students having increasing difficulty managing their mental health, educators and administrators alike face challenges to their wellbeing in carrying out their duties in schools. Research suggests that educators are under growing stress due to factors such as role ambiguity and conflict, workload intensification, and lack of autonomy (Mérida-López et al., 2017). Administrators are not immune from the constraining effects of workplace stresses. Much like their faculty, principals and other administrative staff are suffering from heighted burdens such as work intensification, managing crises or tragedies, and increasingly needing to advocate for students while navigating local policy contexts (Hauseman, 2022). To drive the point home, a 2022 annual survey of Ontario principals presented a landscape of neglect, underfunding, and increasing stress and burnout in Ontario schools, with a majority of principals reporting that they experienced a lack of support and that workplace conditions have taken a toll on their wellbeing and mental health (People for Education, 2022). From a practical point of view, worsening workplace and emotional demands on teachers and administrators at K-12 schools in Canada represent a barrier to a planful approach to change and underscore the urgent need for a collaborative leadership approach that prioritizes the wellbeing of both students and staff together.
Within this moment of need, leveraging the unique role, the skills and expertise of school counsellors can help improve student wellbeing in schools. Unique among faculty and school staff, counsellors are well positioned to play a positive leadership role in K-12 schools for a variety of reasons.
- Social-Emotional Learning and Skillset – School counsellors possess relevant specialist social-emotional content knowledge and skills-based expertise that can be extended into their leadership dispositions and behaviours, creating a school culture of collaboration and encouragement. This social-emotional leadership can positively affect all participants in the school environment, supporting students’ emotional management, perspective taking, and interpersonal relationships, in addition to supporting teacher stress management and capacity maximization to foster greater social-emotional learning (SEL) and positive school climates. In this way, school counsellors have the expertise to lead preventative, school-wide initiatives that can make positive systemic impact.
- Systemic and Relational Networks – School counsellors occupy an important position within related social networks at the nexus of multiple stakeholders that uniquely position school counsellors as relational leaders in schools. Due to their access to and understanding of student data, both formal and informal, counsellors are vital in bridging stakeholders (students, teachers, administrators, parents, and community members) to support student success and wellbeing. With institutional support, counsellors can assist school leadership in the development and implementation of both comprehensive and targeted student support services and programs.
- Distributed Leadership – Given the complexity of the task of educational leadership today, it takes a village to run a school nowadays; a fact that necessitates a more distributed stance on leadership. School counsellors participating in distributed leadership can significantly enhance K-12 school operations through improved decision-making and collaborative practices, with research indicating that counsellors engaged in collaborative decision-making are associated with more effective structures, refined routines, and increased use of data. This involvement also fosters better alignment between programmatic goals, educational quality, and improves school culture along with principal-counsellor collaboration (Rock, 2017).
In Canada, school counsellors must be seen as leaders—not just supporters. The current mental health crisis in schools requires systemic changes to support both staff and students, with school counsellor skillsets and capacities at the forefront of creating more compassionate and resilient school communities. Raising awareness and the profile of school counsellors is an important first step in transforming K-12 education for the better.
THE AUTHOR:
Mark Bunten, Ed.D., Head of Guidance, Lauremont School (Richmond Hill, ON)
Citations:
Hauseman, C. (2022). Workplace conditions that contribute to principals’ emotional labor. In S. Chitpin & R. White (Eds.), Leading under pressure: Educational leadership in neoliberal times (pp. 3-19). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi:10.1108/978-1-80117-358-220221002
Mérida-López, S., Extremera, N., & Rey, L. (2017). Emotion-regulation ability, role stress and teachers’ mental health. Occupational Medicine, 67(7), 540–545. https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqx125
People for Education. (2022). 2021-2022 Annual Ontario school survey (AOSS): A perfect storm of stress. https://peopleforeducation.ca/our-work/annual-ontario-school-survey-results-reveal-lack-of-action-on-challenges/
Pfefferbaum, B. (2021). Challenges for child mental health raised by school closure and home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Current Psychiatry Reports, 23(10), 65–65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-021-01279-z
Rock, W. D., Remley, T. P., & Range, L. M. (2017). Principal-counselor collaboration and school climate. NASSP Bulletin, 101(1), 23–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192636517698037
Statistics Canada. (2024, September 10). 2023 Canadian health survey on children and youth – Changes in the mental health of respondents from the 2019 survey. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240910/dq240910a-eng.htm
Twenge, J.M. (2023). Generations: The real differences between gen z, millennials, gen x, boomers, and silents—and what they mean for America’s future. Atria Books. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=7208544
