What a School Counsellor Can and Cannot Do

The authoritative source on this subject, the American School Counselor Association, writes for counsellors rather than for parents. The parent-facing results are mostly automatically generated legal content. So the ordinary question, what can this person actually do for my kid, does not have a good answer anywhere obvious. Here is one.

What is the job, actually?

A school counsellor is an employee of the school with a caseload of students. The American School Counselor Association, the professional association for the role, describes counsellors on its roles and ratios page as people who “design and deliver school counseling programs that improve student outcomes”. Its position statement sorts the work into direct services to students, which it lists as instruction, appraisal and advisement, and counselling, and indirect services, which it lists as consultation, collaboration and referrals. It recommends that counsellors spend 80 percent or more of their time on those two things.

That is a professional association setting out its own recommended model. It is not law, and it does not bind any district. What your school actually assigns to your counsellor is a local question.

Two things follow from that list, and both are worth saying out loud.

The first is that the role is broad. A counsellor is not a specialist in your child’s particular problem. They are the person holding a large number of different problems at once.

The second is that a counsellor is not a therapist you have engaged. There is no treatment plan, no clinical file you own, and no course of sessions you agreed to. The relationship exists inside the school and it operates on the school’s terms.

Why does caseload explain so much?

Because it is the constraint that determines everything else. A counsellor’s time is divided among every student assigned to them, and in most schools that number is large.

This page is not going to print a national average ratio, because a national average is not a number you can do anything with. The number that matters is your school’s, and your school can tell you.

Ask the principal, not the counsellor, and ask it plainly: how many students is this counsellor responsible for. It is not a hostile question and it is not a complaint about the person. It is the single fact that tells you how much of what you have been promised is realistically available.

Why does “the counsellor is handling it” often mean one conversation?

Because that is frequently the truthful description of what happened, and the phrase does not distinguish it from anything larger.

There is nothing dishonest in it. After an incident, a school will often have a counsellor speak with the student. That conversation may be twenty minutes in a room between lessons. It may be genuinely useful. It is not a course of support, and it will not be described to you as one unless you ask.

Four questions turn the phrase into information.

• How many times have you met, and roughly how long were the meetings?
• Is anything further scheduled, on what date?
• What are you actually working on with him?
• What would have to change for you to refer him to something outside the school?

That last question is the important one. It tells you where the ceiling is.

What does confidentiality mean here?

Less than parents assume, and this site will not tell you otherwise.

A school counsellor is a school employee. What they must pass on, and to whom, is set by state law, district policy and their own professional standards, and those differ. We are not a party to that conversation and cannot warrant anything about it. Neither can any other website, and a page that tells you your child’s conversations are private is making a promise it has no standing to make.

The useful thing is not reassurance. It is a question, and it works in every setting where someone is being asked to talk about something difficult:

What happens with what I tell you?

Ask it at the start of the conversation, not after. Encourage your teenager to ask it too. A counsellor will answer it, and the answer is real information about what kind of conversation this is going to be.

Two related requests are reasonable and are answered routinely: ask for the district’s policy on counselling records and disclosure in writing, and ask what, if anything, from these conversations goes into the education record.

What a counsellor is not

Not a clinician conducting an assessment. If what you actually want is a clinical evaluation, it is worth knowing what one contains so you can tell the difference. AACAP describes a comprehensive psychiatric evaluation as including a description of present problems and symptoms, information about health, illness and treatment including current medications, parent and family health and psychiatric histories, information about development, information about school and friends, information about family relationships, an interview of the young person, an interview of parents or guardians, and where needed laboratory studies or special assessments.

That is a process, and it is not what happens in a twenty-minute conversation between lessons. If you want one arranged, the usual starting point is your paediatrician or family physician. If you need help finding services rather than help in an emergency, the SAMHSA National Helpline listed in the resources on this page is a referral service rather than a crisis line.

Nothing on this site diagnoses anything, and nothing here should be read as saying your child needs an evaluation. That is a decision for you and a clinician.

What did this look like for one family?

Elodie is fifteen. After a shouting incident in a classroom, her parents were told the school counsellor would be involved, and for three weeks they assumed that meant something ongoing was happening.

Her father eventually sent a four-line email with the four questions above. The reply was honest: one meeting, about twenty-five minutes, nothing scheduled, and the counsellor’s own view that a referral outside the school would be worth discussing if the classroom incidents continued.

That answer was not what he had hoped for and it was more useful than what he had assumed. It also told him something he had not known, which was that the referral route existed and what would trigger it. He asked about it directly rather than waiting for the trigger.

This example is illustrative rather than a real family. The four questions are the transferable part.

What this page cannot tell you

What your counsellor’s caseload is, what your district’s disclosure policy says, what will be passed on, or whether the support on offer is enough for your child. All of that is local, and all of it is answerable by people you can email this week.

If the incident behind this is a suspension, the sequence for the first two days is set out in suspended for fighting. If the counsellor is being mentioned in the same conversation as a threat assessment, that is a different and much more formal process, described in when a comment becomes a threat assessment.