Swedish school counsellors − demographics, professional practices, educational background and working life history

ABSTRACT

This article presents findings from a survey conducted on all school counsellors in Sweden. The focus of the article is on Swedish school counsellors’ demographics, professional practice, educational background, working life history and professional autonomy. The survey was web-based and contained 91 questions of both quantitative and qualitative nature. The results show that Swedish school counsellors are predominantly experienced female social workers with academic education in social work and several years’ experience of social work in areas other than school. Employment as a school counsellor is not an entry-level job. The professional practice of Swedish school counsellors predominately focus on remedial work with individual students. Their professional practice focus to a lesser extent on preventive and health promoting work despite the prominent position that preventive and health promoting work are given in the Swedish school act and in the national guidelines. The professional focus of Swedish school counsellors raises questions whether the emphasis on individual remedial work is to be interpreted as a lack of organizational awareness and resources, or if it is an expression of a professional ‘heritage’ from school counsellors prior experience of professional social work within other welfare areas were remedial work are custom. We argue that the focus on remedial work makes it valid to describe the character of Swedish school counsellors’ professional practice as a reflection of Swedish social services in general.

KEYWORDS:

• School counsellor
• School social work
• professional practices
• education background
• demographics

Introduction

In many countries, there are occupational groups in schools who work to meet the needs of students for support related to schooling. This can, for example, be about study guidance, social and psychosocial needs and problems, and general well-being. The focus of this professional work can be remedial, preventive and promoting. Common terms for this work, both in research and school practice, are school social work and school counselling. Consequently, the most common names for these occupational groups are school social workers and school counsellors. Despite the linguistic distinction, no clear line can be drawn between school social work and school counselling. Such distinctions are characterized by historical circumstances and traditions or are an expression of profession-based demarcations.

In some countries, such as the USA, the division of school social work and school counselling is linked to two professions with their own organizations.

School Social Work Association of America (SSWAA) organizes school social workers and describes the professional practice in the following way:

… services related to a person’s social, emotional and life adjustment to school and/or society. School social workers are the link between the home, school and community in providing direct as well as indirect services to students, families and school personnel to promote and support students’ academic and social success. (School Social Work Assiciation of America, 2022)

American School Counselor Association (ASCA) organizes school counsellors and describes professional practice as follows:

School counselors work to maximize student success, promoting access and equity for all students’. (American School Counselor Association 2022)

That by means of both development of individual and interpersonal skills in the student but also advice in choosing educational paths and planning the student’s future educational choices.

In Sweden, the profession of school counsellor and the work of school counselling are traditionally referred to as the school counsellor (skolkurator). The organization that brings together the country’s school counsellors is called the Swedish School Counsellors’ Association. School counsellor is also the term used by school organizers at the country’s schools. The term is also used in job advertisements. In official statistics from Statistics Sweden (Statistikmyndigheten SCB) and Employment agency (Arbetsförmedlingen), school counsellors is the official term for social workers in schools. The occupational position as school counsellor has its own occupational classification code in Swedish official statistics. However, in legal texts and national guidelines, neither ‘school social work’ nor ‘school counselling’ is used to name or describe the professional practice performed by school counsellors. In fact, these legislations, legal documents and guidelines do not use any school-related term at all. The sweeping term counsellor (kurator) is used.

Against this background, it is perhaps surprising to find that today there are voices for ‘renaming’ the work of school counsellors to school social work and school social workers. The most common educational background for the profession is now – and has probably been for a long time (there is no clear data, however) – social work. Among teaching staff at departments of social work at Swedish universities, there is also a strong perception that the school counsellor performs school social work.

Aim of the study

As previously stated, there is a popular belief that Swedish school counsellors have a background in social work, both in terms of education and work experience. Surprisingly, there is hardly any research or statistics that show this is the case. Nor is there data on the demographic composition of this professional group.

This study addresses the educational background, working life history, profession practice and professional autonomy of Swedish school counsellors. By professional practice we mean the concrete activities that school counsellors engage in through their work and the scope of these activities (Molander and Terum 2008). By professional autonomy we mean the freedom of professionals to define the nature of their work in terms of its formal content, quality criteria, barriers to entry, formal education, control mechanisms, ethics, etc (Frostenson 2015).

Background – the Swedish case

Since 1990s the Swedish welfare state has incorporated some neoliberal governing and management ideas, and market-inspired solutions. These ideas have to some extent changed Swedish education policy, for example opening up for privately owned schools and the introduction of free school choice for students (Imsen, Blossing, and Moos 2017; Lundahl 2016; Lundahl et al. 2013).

The Swedish school system can be described as a hybrid between a centralized state governance and highly decentralized forms of mandatorship and ownership. The current school system was created in 1992, when the state allowed the establishment of schools owned by other actors than municipalities (Prop. 1991/92:95 1991; Prop. 1992/93:230 1992). Such actors could be private companies, cooperatives, foundations, etc. Each student receives a sum of money that will pay for the student’s schooling, so-called school voucher. It is the state that ultimately regulates the size of school vouchers. A state authority National Agency for Education sets up price lists per pupil and year. It is important to emphasize that all schooling in Sweden is free of charge for students. No schools are allowed to charge fees from students and their parents.

Regardless of ownership and leadership, it is the Swedish state that controls and regulates the content of the teaching with the overall goal of guaranteeing all students an equal education. The state governs through laws/legislation and regulations as well as curricula and the syllabus. A national authority (The Swedish National Agency for Education) exercises supervision over school activities in the country. The same authority is also responsible for follow-up, evaluation, and development of the school system, above all with regard to learning objectives and knowledge levels. The state also controls the work of Swedish schools in guiding students in their studies and choice of professional career.

Sweden has a long tradition of social interventions to support students during schooling. The social aspect has not always been a separate domain but has also been an aspect of a broader health concept. Gradually, this came to include, in addition to school doctors and school nurses, professional groups such as counsellors and psychologists. It was not until 2010 and The School Act (SFS 2010:800 2010) that social and psychosocial aspects were explicitly highlighted as an indispensable part of student health. The law is an attempt to establish that the school’s educational mission, including individual students’ school performance and health in the broadest sense, are intertwined. Health is not only somatic but also psychosocial and therefore all schools are legally obligated to provide their students access to an organized multi-professional organization for student health, where the school counsellor has his or her given role (SFS 2010:800 2010; Socialstyrelsen & Skolverket, 2016). The School Act is a framework legislation in which the state formulates the overall goals and standards that public and private schools must follow. For student health and its professions, this means that they are expected to a greater extent to work on health promotion and prevention rather than remedial measures. The School Act is, however, a framework legislation giving the schools a great deal of scope for action to adapt the statutory requirement for student health work to local conditions and needs (Socialstyrelsen, & Skolverket 2016). This means that the guidelines contained in the School Act on the orientation, design and organization of student health work are open to interpretation and adaptation at the local level. On the other hand, the School Act is very clear in stipulating which professional groups should work with student health (school doctors, school nurses, psychologists, and counsellors) and that the work should primarily be preventive and health-promoting.

Research on school counsellors

Research on Swedish school counsellors and research on social work in Swedish schools is very limited. The research on Swedish school counsellors has been mostly based on case studies and relatively small groups of school counsellors. The authors of this article would like to point out that there is a complete lack of knowledge and research about counsellors in the school world as a professional group at the national level. In other words, there is limited empirically based knowledge of what the school counsellor’s work looks like in practice. Most research is based on the assumption that a school counsellor is by definition a social worker in a school. It is an ideological and value-laden assumption that lacks support in the regulations that surround the Swedish school system.

The existing research on school counsellors in Sweden has largely studied how school counsellors view their assignments and tasks. Isaksson (2014) studied how school counsellors perceive their scope for action (professional autonomy) and found that the school curator feels dependent on legitimacy-creating resources in the form of clear job descriptions and legitimacy from the principal or immediate superior. Research shows that Swedish school counsellors are led by discipline-specific knowledge rather than the organizational context (i.e. school). Swedish research also shows that school counsellors act pragmatically, rather than using evidence-based methods. This pragmatic way of acting it is based on a robust knowledge base taken from theory formation in social work (Isaksson and Sjöström 2016). Research has also shown that school counsellors lack a clear technology that delimits their work in relation to other professions in student health. Technology mainly refers to conversations with students and consultation with teachers. These types of technologies are also used by other actors in student care/student health and thus do not give school counsellors their own unique technology (Backlund 2007). Kjellgren et al. (2022) studied the conversation practices of Swedish school counsellors and found that there was a common structure to the conversations, but that the specific interventions differed and were characterized by an eclectic position where school counsellors used a broad repertoire of therapeutic approaches and techniques. A Swedish study has also shown that when the services of school counsellors are presented to children and parents, these often appear as abstract and distant from children and parents’ needs (Bergnehr and Johansson 2021).

However, the lack of clarity regarding the school counsellor’s assignments and tasks does not only seem to be unique to Sweden. International research on the school counsellor’s work also shows the school counsellor’s assignments and tasks as filled with variations and ambiguity in the role (Altshuler and Webb 2009; Beck 2017; Gherardi and Whittlesey-Jerome 2018; Huxtable 2013; Richard and Villarreal Sosa 2014). International research also shows that the division of roles between ‘school counsellor’ and ‘school social worker’ is not always clear (Agresta 2004; Astramovich et al. 2013; Özkan, Çalış, and Sever 2019).

Methodology

The survey questionnaire

This study utilizes data from a 91-question online survey administered to a majority of Swedish school counsellors. The survey is divided into five sections, covering respondents’ demographic characteristics, educational background and previous work experience, different aspects of respondents’ current employment including questions about work management, professional activities, and collaboration with other professional groups in the school. The survey included both fixed answer alternatives and open-ended questions. The findings of this article are based on a selection of questions from the various sections of the questionnaire.

The questionnaire used terminology and concepts that are common in school counsellors’ professional language use. That professional terminology is partly created by the profession itself but is also based on language in laws/legislation and governing documents. All terms and concepts in the questionnaire were thus well known to the respondents. A similar questionnaire, and methodology in general, has worked very well in the authors’ previous studies of professional practice in other parts of Swedish social services (Perlinski 2010; Perlinski, Blom, and Morén 2013).

The sample

The ambition was to reach out to all school counsellors in Sweden. However, there is no register of school counsellors in Sweden. According to statistics from Sweden’s Municipalities and Regions (Sveriges Kommuner och Regioner 2019), in 2019 there were approximately 2,600 full-time positions as school counsellors in Swedish municipal schools. On the other hand, at the time of the study, there were no statistics on how many school counsellor positions were available at independent (private) schools in Sweden. It is also not known how many natural persons hold the position of school counsellor. Therefore, the survey was distributed via email to members of a trade union organization Akademikerförbundet, which has about 1400 people in its membership register who have stated that they work as a school counsellor. Respondents were also recruited through the Swedish School Counsellors’ Association’s Facebook group and a professionally specific Facebook group for school counsellors ‘Bollplank’. The chosen distribution channels guarantee that a significant majority, although it is not clear how large, have been invited to complete the survey. When the survey closed in October 2019, 451 responses had been received.

In the absence of a register (sampling frame) of professional school counsellors, neither random sampling procedures nor a census approach could be used. We believe that our sampling procedure was the best possible but can be a source of bias. The academic association SSR organizes social workers, but distribution through this union can lead to a certain over-representation of school counsellors with a social worker (socionom) degree.

Statistical methods

Due to the descriptive nature and aim of the article is most of the analyses based on univariate frequency distributions and measures of central tendency and standard deviation. This type of basic statistical analysis is sufficient to provide a picture of the demographics, professional practice, educational background, working life history and professional autonomy of Swedish school counsellors. The data has not been altered in any way and no recoding of variables was done.

Methodological considerations

The question of the survey’s representativeness cannot be decided statistically, as the selection is based on a non-probability sample using self-selection (Khazaal et al. 2014; Sharma 2017). In the present study, representativeness can be discussed in terms of coverage, i.e. whether all relevant background characteristics are found among the respondents who answered the survey. Representativeness can thus be estimated through demographic and other relevant data about the respondents (Wang et al. 2015). The respondents are distributed geographically in a way that coincides very well with the population distribution in Sweden. Sweden’s population is unevenly distributed across the country. Only 15% of the population lives in rural areas. Of the 85% who live in urbanized parts of the country, the majority live near major cities. Our material reflects exactly these demographic conditions and 66.8% of the responses come from larger cities with surrounding municipalities while the rest come from smaller cities and rural areas. A further argument is that all types of municipalities are represented in the survey. Since the study uses self-selection sampling, there may be a risk of bias in the sample, e.g. that respondents with a particular agenda chose to participate. Such risk must always be considered in the case of non-random samples. However, it is important to keep in mind that self-selection sampling does not necessarily imply that the data is biased. Some of our findings are in line with what other researchers (Beck 2017; Kelly et al. 2010; Phillippo et al. 2017; Richard and Villarreal Sosa 2014) have found in case studies on school counsellors’ professional work.

Main characteristics of the sample

In total, 451 school counsellors answered the questionnaire. Of these, 91.8% were women and 8.2% men. The age distribution was a bit skewed, with a typical value of 32 years and a mean value and a median of 43.7 and 43 years, respectively (standard deviation 10.71). Of the respondents, 77.5% of school counsellors worked full time. It is somewhat more common for male school counsellors to work full time; men 86.5% and women 76.7%. The difference appears significant but should not be over-interpreted since the men are so few. One could say that the typical school counsellor is a full-time working woman in her 40s.

Ethical considerations

Research in Sweden that affects humans falls under the Act (2003:460) on Ethical Review of Research Involving Humans. Research that does not concern sensitive personal data and that does not involve a physical intervention or is aimed at physical or psychological impact or clearly risks harming the subject shall not be tested according to the law. The present study is characterized as a non-interventional study (survey), where sensitive personal data is not processed, and which therefore does not require ethical approval. Because of the sampling procedure the authors have never had access to any kind of register that would enable the identification of respondents. The research must still consider the ethical requirements, as they are set in common codes. The current research reported in this article has followed the Swedish Research Council’s recommendations for good research (All European Academies 2017; Vetenskapsrådet 2017). Ethical considerations have permeated the entire research process from information to respondents, subject suitability, study design and choice of method to confidentiality, guarantees of anonymity, and the dissemination of results. The ethical considerations have been handled with openness, sensitivity, honesty and scientific impartiality (Cohen, Manion, and Morrison 2011). Participation in the study was completely voluntary and respondents were informed that they will remain anonymous for both the researchers and Akademikerförbundet SSR.

Results

The results of the study show that the professional practice of school counsellors is firmly anchored in social work. The study also shows that school counsellors’ work can be characterized as individual-oriented and with a focus primarily on interventions. Their professional practice is conversation-oriented and relies on experience-based methods. The results also show that school counsellors have a high degree of autonomy in their work.

School counsellors are well-educated social workers

In summary, it can be said that Swedish school counsellors are predominantly academically educated in the subject of social work and related disciplines. To the extent that they have postgraduate and further education, these educations can be described as within the mainstream of social work.

The school counsellors appear as a homogeneous group regarding academic undergraduate education. Of the respondents, 80.3% have a social work degree, which in Sweden also means that they have a bachelor’s degree in social sciences. The strong dominance of education closely related to social work is underlined by the fact that 19.5% of counsellors without a social work degree have a degree from the social care programme with a focus on social pedagogy. Nowadays, such education is part of the social work programmes at Swedish colleges and universities. The rest of the counsellors, those without a social work degree, have undergraduate degrees in behavioural science and social sciences, e.g. sociology, psychology, social psychology, etc.

The image of the school counsellor as a profession well-established in the social science field is reinforced when looking at the counsellors’ further and advanced education. In addition to a university degree, a notable proportion (32.8%) of the respondents also have at least one further or advanced education and training, with 3.3% having several further educations. The most common further education is basic psychotherapy education. As many as 11.5% have this education. The second most common further education is in fact an academic postgraduate education, namely a Master’s degree in social work, which 8.0% have. A majority (75.2%) state that they have further education which, although not a postgraduate education, they themselves consider to be relevant to their work as a school counsellor. Within that category are a multitude of specific and non-specific working methods including professional conversations, family therapy, LAC (Looking After Children), MI (Motivational Interviewing), CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), ART (Aggression Replacement Training) and more.

School counsellors are experienced social workers

It can be stated that school counsellor is not an entry-level job but rather a job for relatively experienced professionals within the field of social work. It can also be stated that their previous work experience is in different social work arenas. In addition to a degree in social work, work experience in social work is of great importance. As many as 83.3% of the school counsellors had experience of social work before their first employment as a school counsellor. Among those with a social work degree, the proportion was 88.9% and for those without a social work degree the proportion was 79.3%. This is also significant experience of social work, where the median is 6 years (mode = 3.0 years, mean 8.14 years and standard deviation = 6.45 years).

In our data, we can follow the working life history of the respondents on the way to their first employment as a school counsellor. As Figure 1 shows, more than half of our respondents worked as highly qualified social workers in social services in general and personal social services (PSS) in particular, immediately before they took up employment as a school counsellor. This type of work is the core of all social work in Sweden and takes place primarily in the municipalities, but also in other parts of the public sector. A further 28.5% have worked with other types of social work in the public sector. Thus, an absolute majority (83.4%) of school counsellors come from employment as highly qualified social workers in the public sector.

Figure 1. Employment immediately before the first employment as a school counsellor. (proportions as a percentage of all respondents).

In fact, we can follow each respondent’s three employments, in chronological order, preceding the first employment as a school counsellor. The trend described above also exists when analysing previous employments. Swedish school counsellors are recruited primarily among highly educated social workers with experience of working with welfare issues in the public sector.

Professional practice of school counsellors

A legitimate question concerns components of the work of a school counsellor. In other words, the question of what school counsellors do. Our survey included questions about several common work activities that are part of school counsellors’ professional practice.

An important issue for the understanding of the practice of the profession is how much of the work of school counsellors is devoted to the three dimensions, health promotion, prevention, and remedial work, as the law and guidelines state. Table 1 focuses on this.

Table 1. How much working time do school counsellors spend on health-promoting, preventive or remedial work? (measures of central tendency calculated on the extent as a percentage of working hours per week).

	Median	Mean	Standard deviation	n=
Remedial	60.00	57.33	22.00	418
Preventive	20.00	24.51	14.02	411
Health-promoting	15.00	18.39	12.39	405

The results are striking. School counsellors mainly engage in remedial work that takes significantly more than half of their working time. There is not much room left for health promotion and preventive work.

Table 2 shows that about two thirds of the working time is spent working with students. This is about the average scope per normal working week. Admittedly, all three measures of central tendency are close to each other and indicate a normal distribution, but it must be noted that the spread is quite large. About a quarter of the working time is devoted to administrative tasks. However, we cannot comment on whether these administrative tasks are related to student work or also to other administration in the school.

Table 2. School counsellors’ work activities per week. (measures of central tendency calculated on the extent as a percentage of working hours per week).

To what extent do you engage in the following activities during a normal working week?	Median	Mean	Standard deviation
Student-related work	65.0	62.50	16.06
Administration	25.0	26.80	12.94
Other	19.0	13.48	10.62
Own education/skills development	5.0	6.07	4.56
Travel, relocation	5.0	5.75	4.98

The most important tools in a school counsellor’s arsenal are meetings and conversations. Table 3 shows the structure of school counsellor meetings. Meetings and conversations with individual students are the most common type of meeting and almost 90% state that they have such meetings often. The high frequency of ‘often’ as an answer distinguishes these from other types of meetings. It is also noteworthy that a school counsellor’s work usually takes place at the individual level towards individual students and much less often towards students in groups. Working with groups of parents is almost non-existent. On the other hand, contact with other student health staff and the principal is very frequent.

Table 3. School counsellors’ work-related activities. (proportions as a percentage of all respondents).

To what extent do you carry out the following activities?	Often	Rarely or never
Meet children/young people (students) individually	89.4	1.9
Have a meeting with student health staff or the principal	78.6	1.1
Consult or supervise teachers or resource persons within the school	34.6	13.8
Meet parents of an individual child	19.4	26.3
Meet children/young people (students) in groups	15.2	36.7
Participate in the work in the classroom	8.4	48.6
Meets parents in groups	1.1	91.7

If you shift the focus from who school counsellors work with to what the conversations are about, a slightly different picture emerges. That picture reflects a more individual-oriented focus towards individual students in the school counsellor’s work. Table 4 shows the results for each type of conversation.

Table 4. Types of conversations that school counsellors’ conduct. (proportions as a percentage of all respondents).

To what extent do you conduct the following types of conversations?	Often	Rarely or never
Supportive conversation	89.6	0.7
Guiding/advisory conversation	78.6	2.7
Investigative conversation	30.1	18.3
Processing conversation	29.0	66.9
Supervision of staff	19.1	29.1
Other types of conversations	18.4	28.6
Parent talks	18.1	31.4
Crisis handling talks	15.2	33.9
Therapeutic/treatment conversations	7.9	70.5
Group talks	5.9	47.3
Family counselling	2.1	75.1

By far the most common type of conversation is supportive conversations closely accompanied by guiding/advisory conversations with the students. Once again, the individual-oriented nature of school counsellors’ work can be seen in the low incidence of group discussions. At the same time, it is also clear that the work to a relatively small extent includes purely therapeutic and semi-therapeutic elements. Family counselling is also rare.

Regardless of which of the different activities school counsellors engage in, their use of methods is characterized by an emphasis on non-specific methods, eclecticism, and their own mixes of several different methods, as well as personal experience and intuition. This can be seen in answers to questions about respondents’ use of working methods. As many as 81.3% say they often work that way. Very few (1.4%) say that they rarely or never work eclectically and improvisational A few (1.4%) could not answer the question about method use. In terms of working methods, school counsellors do not differ significantly from other social workers in Swedish municipalities (Perlinski 2010; Perlinski, Blom, and Morén 2013).

Professional scope for action

In addition to knowledge of what school counsellors do, their perception of their own role is also of interest. Table 5 shows that school counsellors appear in the survey as a professional group with strong trust and conviction about the importance of their own work in the school. They are also relatively positive about how student health is organized based on both the best interests of the students and the school counsellor’s assignment.

Table 5. School counsellors’ attitudes to their role. (proportions as a percentage of all respondents).

I believe that:	To a very high degree	To high degree
the organization of student health work at my workplace is designed with the needs of students in mind	16.5	55.6
the organization of student health work at my workplace is designed with regard to my assignment as a school counsellor	9.3	48.1
I contribute to the school’s equal treatment and values work	37.8	45.2
I help remove barriers to student learning	20.9	62.0
I contribute to health promotion work at school	20.1	51.1
I contribute to preventive work in school	23.7	51.1
I contribute to remedial work in school	52.6	41.0

It should be noted that a very high proportion of school counsellors believe that they contribute to remedial work in schools. Remedial work refers to the school’s response when a problem, e.g. bullying, comes to the school’s attention. Equal treatment and values work, as well as prevention work, are to some extent overlapping categories.

School counsellors seem to have a great deal of professional freedom in terms of who leads their daily work. It is surprising that an overwhelming majority, almost two-thirds (60.1%), answer that they themselves lead their work, and nearly one third (31.4%) answer that it is their direct school organizer, i.e. principal.

School counsellors also believe that the way they are led and supervised by the school organizers corresponds well with their own perception of what the role of school counsellor is about. Overall, 54.8% agree on this (18.3% totally agree and 36.5 largely agree), while only 8.0% disagree.

This result is interesting because it indicates that the majority see no conflict between the ideals of their own profession and the school’s way of leading and supervising their work.

Discussion

The purpose of this article is the study of Swedish school counsellors as a professional group in terms of demographic characteristics, professional practices, educational background, working life history and professional autonomy. The purpose is also the study of how Swedish school counsellors’ professional practices relate to what in international research is described as school counselling and school social work. One must be careful when interpreting results obtained in a cross-sectional survey, as measurements are obtained at a given single point in time. The only sure thing you can do is to state that things are in a certain way, i.e. mainly a description. On the other hand, even a description can open up for broader interpretations. Below is a summary of the results, as well as a discussion of possible explanations for why the practices look the way they do and what possible consequences this may have for school social work and the school counselling profession.

Based on the results of the study, the typical Swedish school counsellor can be described as a woman aged just over 40 years-old who works full time and has an education in social work. In addition, the position as school counsellor is not her first social work job; she most likely has solid experience of social work before she starts as a school counsellor. She works mainly with individual students and her method use is rather eclectic.

The results of the study show that Swedish school counsellors have established themselves as social workers in Swedish schools and that the school counsellor profession has strong links to social work in other arenas. In other words, the school appears as a new arena for generic social work. This is not entirely in line with the intentions of the state, which characterizes the school counsellor’s work mainly as health promotion and prevention work. The results show that there is a clear ‘isomorphism’ between the professional practices of school counsellors and municipal social workers. Previous Swedish research has shown that Swedish municipal social services tend to adopt a similar organizational form, although the individual municipalities (all 290 of them) have complete freedom to choose their organizational form (Lundgren et al. 2016). This ‘isomorphism’ does not refer to a normative isomorphism in which professions act identically (cf. DiMaggio and Powell 1983), but rather as a depiction of the practice of the profession in different arenas. ‘isomorphism’ is visible in the fact that school counsellors dedicate most of their working time to student-related work, which is to a large extent individual-centred. The school counsellor’s work is mostly remedial and focused on the individual student’s problems. The most common types of conversations are conversations with individual students and meetings with student health staff and the principal. The school counsellor’s method use shows great similarities with other areas of social work, with the emphasis on eclectic or improvisational use of both specific and non-specific methods (Perlinski 2010; Perlinski, Blom, and Morén 2013). Our results show unequivocally that the close connection between generic social work and the school counsellor’s professional practice is no coincidence. We can state that the educational background of school counsellors is social work and any supplementary education for the most part focuses on the individual and on remedial efforts. School counsellors enter the profession with previous, often relatively many years-long, experience of social work. Other research (Jansson, Evertsson, and Perlinski 2021) has shown that organizers and principals actively recruit social workers with academic degrees (socionom) or people with other education in social work. In other words, one could say that it will be more ‘social work’ than ‘school’.

Swedish social work has a long history of intricate interdependencies between vocational training in social work and the needs of Swedish municipalities. This is natural considering that the country’s social legislation has in relatively modern times been designed so that the responsibility for the well – being of the citizens has been placed on municipalities and that the legislation has focused on the individual. Swedish municipal social work is consequently very individual-centred, while more collectivist solutions such as community work are mostly absent, which becomes especially clear in international comparisons. The municipalities are the dominant organizer for both social services and school counselling activities. It would be unlikely that, given the same organizer, accustomed to a certain way of working and to employing a specific category of civil servants with a relatively uniform educational background in social work did not play a role. Previous research (Jansson, Evertsson, and Perlinski 2021) has shown that school organizers and principals, when recruiting new staff, to a large extent want applicants with a degree in social work (socionomexamen).

We can thus state that school has become a new arena for social work, at least as a significant labour market for academically educated social workers. This is a process that has probably been going on for a long time (a few decades). It can also be argued that it is a stable arena that also places high demands on the qualifications of social workers. In contrast to municipal activities such as personal social services or elderly care, school counsellor is not an entry-level job. On the contrary, it requires not only formal education but also long experience from the various areas of social work. These requirements may not always be explicitly stated, but if you study the professional careers of school counsellors, you will see that they are there.

An overall impression from our empirical material is that school counsellors have found their place in the school world and established a clear jurisdiction that is not questioned by other professional groups in the school. Talking about school counsellors, especially school counsellors who are social workers, as ‘guests’ at school is misleading. On the other hand, it is clear that school counsellors represent social work in the school world, and to a significant extent and strength, but they are not integrated into the school’s pedagogical activities. This does not necessarily have to be a disadvantage or a weakness.

The fact that school counsellors are actively involved in profession-specific networks can be interpreted as a sign of a strong and well-established professional group. Our empirical evidence points to the fact that the school counsellors do not seem to be on the way to developing into their own specific profession, but rather the opposite. The dominant position of social workers is clear and means that the school is an arena for generic social work.

School counsellors spend most of their working time on student-related work. The most common types of conversations are conversations with individual students and meetings with student health staff and the principal. At the same time, school counsellors have quite high opinions about their own significance for removing obstacles to students’ learning, contributing to the school’s basic values work and, above all, remedial work in the school. It is also clear that, like large parts of municipal social services, school counselling work is individual-oriented. It is individual students who are in focus. One possible explanation for this may be that municipal social work is focused on helping the individual citizen. This is due both to how the legislation is designed and how the municipalities organize their work. The second explanation may be that the Swedish school is also individual-centred and focused on individual students’ achievements of learning objectives. The financing of school activities is also based on individual students and their school vouchers, i.e. the politically decided amount of economic resources linked to a specific student.

The discrepancy between the emphasis on health promotion and prevention that are expressed in the School Act and the school counsellors’ focus on remedial work is an interesting empirical finding. Our intention is, nota bene, not to criticize the professional orientation of school counsellors’ work or to prescribe the future orientation of their practice since we do not see it as our task to define what the focus of school social work should be. However, the professional focus of Swedish school counsellors raises questions about whether the emphasis on individual remedial work is an expression of a professional ‘heritage’ from school counsellors prior experience of professional social work within other welfare areas where remedial work is custom, or if it is to be interpreted as a lack of organizational awareness and resources. Regardless of the answer to these questions, we argue that the focus on remedial work makes it valid to describe the character of Swedish school counsellors’ professional practice as a reflection of Swedish social services in general.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the municipality of Åre and Umeå University.