With SSLC and higher secondary exam results around the corner, the counsellors attached to government schools in Ernakulam have ramped up counselling to assuage the anxieties of students.
The district has 65 active school counsellors under the Integrated Child Development Scheme of the Department of Women and Child Development.
These counsellors started reaching out to students from the second week of this month with the larger goal of covering all students in government schools by the time the results were announced.
“We have set an order of priority in offering telephonic counselling. The initial focus was on intellectually-challenged students and their parents followed by the more anxious students of which we have collated a list at the time they appeared for the exams. The least tensed of the lot are being rang up as last priority,” said Mahitha Vipinachandran, one of the psychosocial school counsellors.
The counselling has revealed widespread anxieties about the future of their education among a large section of students who are from poor families and whose parents have been rendered jobless under the economic impact of the pandemic. “Other than that, the frustration of having been restricted to their homes for months has emerged as the most common concern, with the anxiety about exam results per se taking a back seat,” said Ms. Vipinachandran.
School counsellors undertake home visits of students found to be in need of extended counselling sessions with the help of ward councillors and Anganawadi teachers.
Parents also seek out the service of these counsellors about disturbing behaviour patterns of their wards, thus often broadening the scope of the service beyond the anxieties of exam results.
The exam-related counselling was the latest addition to numerous tasks being assigned to the school counsellors since the outbreak of the pandemic. They had already been reaching out to quarantined people under the District Mental Health programme since March.
These 65 counsellors collectively make calls in the range of 700-800 a day to the quarantined people over and above the calls to students awaiting results.
