Concerns have been raised over continued funding for mental health support in Stirling’s secondary schools.
Trossachs and Teith Tory councillor Martin Earl recently praised the service being provided to local pupils, almost 250 of whom accessed one-to-one therapeutic support in the last full school year.
Around 300 pupils meanwhile accessed one-off appointments with their school counsellor.
But he said he was “genuinely worried” Scottish Government funding, due to be reviewed next March, was not yet guaranteed to continue.
The councillor raised the issue at a recent meeting of Stirling Council’s children and young people committee.
Officials said they regularly fed back positive reports to the Scottish Government on how the current funding - part of a wider National Mental Health Strategy - was being used, and it was hoped this would influence any decision on renewal.
The committee heard the School Counselling Service launched in five secondary schools in August 2020 and all secondary schools had a counsellor in place by December 2020.
Five counsellors were employed on fixed-term contracts and services were also procured from local organisations such as Wellbeing Scotland and Action in Mind.
In their report, officers said: “The coordinator for school counselling liaises with the counsellors and schools to ensure there is consistency in service provision, to provide support and advice and to collage ongoing evaluations of the service.
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“The school counsellors work closely with other school staff to provide support where it is needed.
“The counsellors provide a range of supports from supporting all pupils through personal and social education, contributing to assemblies or providing one-to-one therapeutic counselling.
“Time to Talk support is where any young person attending a mainstream secondary school can request a short, one-off appointment with their school counsellor. During the 2020/21 academic session, 300 young people accessed Time to Talk support.
“In an anonymous survey, 82.5 per cent of the 40 respondents stated they would recommend it to a friend who needed support.
“The majority of the counsellors’ time is spent providing one-to-one therapeutic support.
“During the 2020/21 session, 244 secondary-aged pupils accessed this form of support. The most common reasons for pupils accessing counselling support were due to low mood/depression, stress/anxiety and low self-esteem.
“A total of 56 pupils completed their counselling sessions at a time of gathering evaluation data and they were willing to complete a post-counselling evaluation. All of the pupils reported improvement in at least one area that they had identified.
“The school counselling service will continue to the new academic session of 2021/22. Six monthly evaluation reports are generated for the Scottish Government.”
Councillor Earl said the service was “well regarded and doing good work across our schools” but asked how embedded it was going forward.
“When it comes to fixed-term contracts when will some of these people reach the ends of these contracts?,” he said.
“I’m very concerned about this because it’s an excellent service and doing what was needed to be done.
“There would be nothing worse in my mind than to stop it after starting it. It would be a retrograde step and I’m genuinely worried about it. Perhaps we should have a specific report to the committee about the status of this and the way forward.
“It can often be a tight window getting answers from the Scottish Government and there will be people who are having to look at their own situations if they are on fixed-term contracts.”
Officials said the service was part of a wider mental health approach being followed by the council, adding: “We are obviously feeding back to the Scottish Government in terms of the impact data and we are hoping this will inform the Scottish Government that this is worthy of long-term investment.
“Some school counsellors are on fixed-term contracts and some on a procurement basis. That’s reviewed annually. We are having continued conversations with them with regard to what we are hoping will happen, ie continuation of the funds.”
