Common tasks shared by the pedagogue and headteacher, written in the Program guidelines for the primary school counseling service

Alenka Jurič Rajh

Summary:  The Slovenian school system offers a counseling service as a specially organized unit, where the counselors work with the students, teachers, headteachers, parents, and others. However, this research primarily concerned the cooperation between the counseling service and the headteacher. Within the counseling service, we focused on the pedagogue’s profile and identified the common tasks shared by the pedagogue and the headteacher, as outlined in the program guidelines for the primary school counseling service. At the same time, in a qualitative study including interviews with three headteachers and three pedagogues, we explored the areas in which there appeared to be a need to supplement the program guidelines. We concluded that it would be necessary to add cooperation between the pedagogue and the headteacher in the following areas: enrolment in the school, participation of pupils with special needs, learning problems, foreign nationals and immigrants, and the implementation and evaluation of the school’s education plan. At the system level, we propose organizing in-service training that is designed to complement the counselor’s knowledge of his or her profile. This in-service training would mostly be useful in schools that employ only one counselor, so that he or she can adopt an interdisciplinary approach to complementing his or her knowledge.