This article presents New Zealand school counsellors' narratives of counselling adolescents from a strength-based perspective. Strength-based counselling encompasses several counselling modalities including positive psychology, narrative and solution-focused brief counselling and promotes adolescents' strengths to enhance wellbeing. Using…

Truancy is a longstanding, unresolved educational issue in countries where there are compulsory attendance policies. It represents a long-term cost to society in expenditure on health, well-being and incarceration. Previous research has focused on key demographic variables related to truancy, causal factors, interventions and a variety of…

Schools are currently working through the implications of the New Zealand Curriculum and its translations into practice. To date there has been little discussion of the contributions of school guidance counseling. For learning and teaching to become a collective, whole-school endeavour, Cowie at el., (2011) suggested, "cross-fertilisation of…

An extensive international literature now supports the potential of parental involvement (PI) for improving children's academic achievements and social outcomes. This research also suggests that involvement which schools organize themselves is more effective than externally imposed PI programmes. It is therefore important to investigate PI…

The International School Psychology Survey (ISPS) was used to gather information about New Zealand educational psychologists' characteristics, training, roles, activities, preferences, research interests and the challenges they experienced in their work. The results of this survey were considered in relation to the social and cultural context of…

The history of counseling psychology in Australia, which has been marked by confusion and uncertainty about the distinction between it and other applied areas such as clinical psychology, community psychology, educational psychology, and psychotherapy, is discussed in this paper. The development of the Division of Counselling Psychology within the…

Counselors sometimes struggle with professional challenges, a situation that can be more difficult with a lack of support among colleagues. Finding an alternative community of support can make a crucial difference for well being. Recommendations are drawn from kinship networks of the Maoris of New Zealand to demonstrate how they can serve as a…

Describes the process by which two school psychologists changed roles from providers of direct services to high school students to providers of indirect services to teachers. Four phases followed in the change to a consultation role are described. Implications for training of school psychologists in consultation are discussed. (NRB)