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First, some background: although I had been working with universities, families and international students for more than 20 years beforehand, I only officially became a university counsellor two years ago.

My school (unlike me) is young, and this year saw only the third cohort of graduating IB students depart for their university studies. So as well as being a new role for me, having their first university counsellor was also a learning experience for the school.

Facilitator: ‘If you want to be accepted for medicine, you need to...’

Most of my university counselling experience before joining the school was as a facilitator for students or families who knew where they wanted to go and what they wanted to study. What they wanted from me was strategies, tactics and knowledge of how those particular universities chose their students.

One thing I learnt quickly was that the facilitator role was what many of my colleagues (and most parents) believed was the prime function of a university counsellor.

Guide: ‘Let me help you research that’

There are many things that I like about my school, but ranking highly is that it is non-selective, which meant that I had to think beyond being the facilitator and start to become more of a guide.

Being a guide means opening my students’ eyes to the many opportunities and paths before them – thinking beyond university rankings and medicine or law. Being a guide means not telling students what they should be aiming at, but helping them to do their own research (ChatGPT and other generative AI programmes are very helpful here), based on their own interests, academic backgrounds and family circumstances.

Being a guide means having to stop myself saying things like, “The best university for economics is…”, or “As you are doing maths and physics, you should look at engineering.”

Seed-sower: ‘What’s most important to you?’

Working in a school with an excellent PSHE programme has meant that I have become much more aware of the links between well-being and academic success. So the third element of my transition to becoming an effective counsellor has involved becoming more of a seed-sower.

The seed-sower doesn’t talk about particular universities or courses; the seed-sower gets the students to think about what is important to them in their current and future lives – where they feel most confident and secure, what values are important to them, whether they’re interested in global issues, what sort of peer groups they belong to, how they picture themselves as 25 or 30-year-olds. Only then do we progress to the guide stage.

No one-size-fits-all combination

There is no one-size-fits-all combination of facilitator, guide and seed-sower. The mix will depend on a counsellor’s own strengths and the particular environments that they work in – but it is also a dynamic model because a counsellor’s role changes throughout the academic year.

Self-reflection is important, and each of us has our own way of doing this. For me, visual and graphical representations work best, such as mind maps and visual manifestations of data. So I created a simple streamgraph of my year, showing how the balance of the three elements of my role changes with the seasons and allowing me to reflect on how best I can support my students.

You will have your own methods, but is an excellent open-source programme that might be helpful.

I would like to acknowledge the Opening Provocation video by Jeff Neill as a source of inspiration for this piece, in particular Jeff’s discussion of the “What, where and how” of his own role.