Conflicting norms in Danish and Norwegian educational psychology counselling
Peer reviewed, Journal article
Published version
Date
2024Metadata
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Original version
10.18261/njwel.3.3.3Abstract
With rising special education expenditures in many countries, educational psychology services (EPS) have been brought to the centre of renewed attention. Educational psychology counselling plays a vital role in facilitating inclusive education and addressing and fulfilling students’ mental health needs in the educational context. Like many public services, EPS work is characterized by a lack of resources and by high-stakes accountability. However, as the resource perspective is widely discussed in the literature and public debate, we turn our attention to a less explored topic – the mismatch or conflict between the EPS users’ expectations from the services and the accountability demands and the resources made available to the services from the authorities. Through open in-depth interviews with Danish and Norwegian EPS professionals, we identify three interrelated conflicting norms encountered by EPS professionals: a methodological conflict (whether to work on a system/organizational level or with individual evaluation), time and capacity conflicts (time pressure and limited resources) and a normative conflict between loyalty to what the EPS professionals perceive as a restricting system and loyalty to the children with and for whom they work. We argue that there is a need for more research that does not simply take the conflicting demands as a given premise but focuses on how these are experienced and dealt with.