Over Forty Years of Guidance Counselling: Specialist Teachers in New Zealand Secondary Schools 1959-2001

Abstract

This article provides a brief overview of forty years of guidance counselling in New Zealand secondary schools, at a time that has seen New Zealand move from a welfare state to a neoliberal one. By focussing primarily on official policy and its impact on the place of guidance counsellors, it identifies five phases in the development of this small, but important section of semi-visible “specialist teachers”. The article also provides a broad picture of the socio-political-historical contexts that supported the emergence of assisted pilot guidance counsellor schemes at the end of 1959, and their development so that there were permanent places in all secondary schools by 1988. It also indicates some of the threats in the neoliberal policy environment of the 1990s.