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Report on the National Consultation Process on Lifelong Learning

Key Message 5: Rethinking Guidance & Counselling

Guidance focuses on the individual learner and imparts both skills essential to future decision taking as well as provides information about vocational and other educational opportunities, career options and paths. Both these elements are crucial to lifelong learning and both need to remain a priority during the period of formal schooling.

The notion that access to guidance and counselling is a lifelong and lifewide one poses a challenge and a task that are far from easy to fulfil. Within the Maltese context, the more feasible approach may well be not to start at the beginning but to build on what we already have. The Division of Education has developed an effective Guidance and Counselling Service up to and including the point of transition to the workplace or to tertiary education. A network of guidance teachers in every school is co-ordinated by a team of professionally trained counsellors, an Education Officer and an Assistant Director. Together they facilitate a key student service with several examples of good practice which include:

  1. valid work on developmental guidance in partnership with other providers adopting a whole-school approach targeting identified learner needs;
  2. impressive Education-Business links;
  3. well equipped and updated Career Rooms at the school level and an eventful annual Careers Convention at the national level;
  4. pioneering work with parents including an on-going Parenting Skills Programme provided at both national and community levels;
  5. a supportive and comprehensive Schoolgirl Mothers' Unit facility;
  6. various substance abuse prevention programmes with other agencies and NGOs.
This is not an exhaustive list. The Department for Further Studies and Adult Education annually publishes a comprehensive catalogue of post-secondary education opportunities that is delivered free-of-cost to all households with a youth reaching the end of compulsory schooling. The Employment and Training Corporation (ETC) complements the work of the Division of Education by offering ad hoc and regular guidance oriented training programmes by a team of advisers. Their client groups range from women returning to the labour market to supported employment units for groups with special needs or those in the process of rehabilitation. The University of Malta runs a Student Services Office which offers a service and organises guidance activities on campus. The Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology is developing a Student Support and Service Unit one of its strategic priorities. The industrial sector undertakes several initiatives to enhance school-to-work links; it facilitates student visits, experience and attachments, provides sponsorships, involves itself in educational issues and contributes to examples of valid experiential learning such as SCOOPS and the Young Enterprise. The collective experience of these key players constitutes invaluable expertise that needs to be built upon when rethinking of guidance provision in lifelong learning terms.

In early 2000, the Ministry of Education invited major stakeholders to rethink the current modality of providing guidance and counselling services and to consider innovative ways - such as on-line access and link-ups to industries regarding particular job profiles and related on-the-job training - of providing such a service on a wider scale. This Ministry initiative has provided an impetus for the review and restructuring of current provision in this crucial area of lifelong learning. The process is still continuing.

Among the suggestions put forward by stakeholders are the following:

  1. Innovative methods need to be developed in the career guidance sector. Such innovations could include:
    a. the introduction of on-line career guidance accessible from schools and homes through which students may search job and training as well as mentoring provision in fields of interest;
    b. a brokerage service at school level through the Schools as Community Learning Centres initiative so that the guidance provided by the broker would respect the circumstances of clients (contextualised guidance);
    c. special approaches that would effectively target disadvantaged groups at the local level.
  2. A new breed of Job/Career Brokers needs to be developed in Malta. Professional training needs to be developed for this cadre of service provided. They would need to be highly skilled in ICT in order to extend their knowledge to career and job opportunities elsewhere in Europe. Training opportunities in this area could be maximised through participation in Leonardo II and Socrates II programmes of the EU Commission. Practice Guidelines as well as a Code of Practice would need to be developed for these brokers.
  3. Maybe the following services that already offer vocational/career guidance to different age groups could join forces to develop and propose a coherent national strategy for the provision of a Job Brokerage Service: (a) the Student Services Office at the University of Malta; (b) the Guidance and Counselling Section of the Division of Education, (c) the Employment & Training Corporation (ETC), (d) the Student Information and Services Unit at the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology, etc.
  4. Youth organisations should be encouraged and supported to start and effectively manage (a) Training Opportunities Brokerage services, and (b) Mentoring Schemes. Projects could be developed through participation in the EU Youth Programme.
  5. Ministries should provide their employees with guidance and counselling to mitigate employee/job mismatch and burnout.
  6. Existing resources and provision need to be streamlined preferably through the setting up of a national body. Moreover, plans to establish a national resource centre for Guidance and Counselling need to be stepped up.
  7. Maltese citizens should be made more aware of the notion of Guidance and Counselling in order to remove misconceptions and increase access to provision.
  8. The content of initial and in-service courses for persons involved in guidance and counselling services should be reviewed and improved. Such training needs to ensure the acquisition of high level ICT skills.
  9. Service providers should be pro-active and experiment with both outreach work to reach persons who would benefit most from the service, as well as incorporating a client-follow-up component to safeguard continued access to lifelong learning opportunities.
  10. The roles and responsibilities of School-based Guidance and Counselling needs rethinking and re-negotiation with Unions.
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