Content area
Full text
Counselling Skills for Teachers: Talking Matters KING, G., 1999 Buckingham: Open University Press ISBN 0-335-20000-1 13.99 Reviewed by John McGuiness, Centre for Studies in Counselling, University of Durham
This is competent, down-to-earth and eminently useful text that both newly qualified and experienced teachers will find immensely reassuring. The shift that we have seen in education from the 1979 survey of secondary education (DES) with its clarion declaration that the `central purpose of education' is `the personal development' of the child to the current instrumentality of the shame/ blame culture has drawn with it a dehumanising ethos that sees children and their teachers in terms of `target-achievement'. Gail King reminds us that behind all the league tables lie human beings with the social and emotional vulnerabilities that that implies.
The opening chapter sets the scene with a review of how teachers have always regarded their task as going beyond the purely academic. King then briefly surveys the options of how that responsibility might be discharged-through a `pastoral provision' by the classroom teacher, or via classroom teachers who have developed `counselling skills' (one of the recommendations of the Elton Report on Discipline in Schools; DES, 1989), or...