Mick Hartley

The dream of social workers and psychologists is coming nearer day by day. Children’s Minister Margaret Hodge has suggested that children be given counselling in schools:

Writing in the latest edition of the journal Counselling in Education, Hodge said that she hoped counselling would one day ‘be delivered in mainstream settings, like schools’, and added that ‘counselling for pupils and students who are having emotional difficulties both inside and outside school can be a lifeline, a turning-point in their lives’.

Hodge’s comments follow the publication of a survey showing that depression will be second only to heart disease as the biggest global health burden by 2020.

According to a new charity, the Depression Alliance, one in five people will be affected by depression at some stage. More than 2.9 million people in Britain are diagnosed as having depression at any one time, the alliance said last week.

‘All too often, it seems that there is no one to talk to, that there is no one who will understand what they are going through,’ Hodge writes.

She goes on to suggest that there is a need to encourage the development of multi-disciplinary teams of workers consisting of trained counsellors and other professionals who will work alongside teachers and also called for a debate on where the funding should come from.

The purpose of education, it seems, will in the future be to identify which particular syndromes each child suffers from, and then to provide the necessary therapies to alleviate these syndromes. Since psychology, like gas – or work – will expand to occupy whatever space is available to it, there can never be an end to this process.