Students are being impacted by lack of counselors in schools as the National Substance Abuse Advisory Council’s former Acting Chair, Misaele Driubalavu has highlighted that the number of counselors were cut down from 29 to only 4 by a previous Minister for Education.
While speaking during the public consultation on the review of the Education Act at Albert Park, Driubalavu says their positions were disestablished, reorganised, and redistributed where they moved to work at Marela House.
Driubalavu says there is a need for more counselors as the current counselors are overwhelmed and in the 12 years he was at the Council, he realised they were exhausted, burnt out, stressed and needed to take time off.
He says the Ministry needs to conduct research on the work each counselor does.
While acknowledging the work of the current Council Chair, Driubalavu says apart from counselling they do other work such as teacher training, peer education training, community awareness, and prepare for International Day Against Drug Abuse in June.
He is also recommending research to be done for the amount of work teachers in boarding school do in terms of extra curricular activities as they are not only teaching in the school but they are also supervising students in boarding, sports, extracurricular activities, cultural, church, and so many other things.
Driubalavu also recommends an assessment on the impact of Training of Teachers as well as peer education.
He has also recommended increasing the retirement age of counselors to 70.
