Mrs Hodge said she wanted to see targeted services such as counselling in mainstream schools. In an interview in this month's Counselling in Education, a journal of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, she said that schools were in the best position to give children and young people the 'skills they need to meet the challenges we all have to face in life, and that includes their emotional well-being'.
She pointed out that the Green Paper, Every Child Matters, spoke of 'other support services available to children and young people on school sites'
and that counsellors 'could well form part of that team'.
But Mrs Hodge questioned whether the funding for such services should come from the school or the Children's Trust, and said she was 'interested to hear people's views'.
John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said he believed an on-site counselling service would be a 'very useful provision', provided the Government came up with the resources neccessary to set this up. 'Teachers already have a difficult workload. They do not have the necessary training and qualifications to become counsellors,' he added.
The mental health charity YoungMinds said it was also in favour of counsellors in schools, providing they had sufficient time to meet all the needs and to keep 'some sort of open door for those pupils who feel diffident about making an appointment'. YoungMinds' acting director, Dinah Morley, said, 'Standards need to be in place for the counselling task, and counsellors need to be properly qualified and accredited. School counsellors frequently need to re-open cases, as pupils want to come back.
Their systems have to allow for this in the least bureaucratic way.'
But Ms Morley said she thought Mrs Hodge could have raised the issue that children and young people cannot cope well in school if their mental health is not good when they arrive there, or if it becomes bad during their stay.
She said, 'While academic achievement certainly does protect mental health, academic achievement is not something that young people with mental health problems can aspire to. These problems and the underlying causes must be dealt with first if the student is to achieve his or her potential.'
Anne Longfield, chief executive of 4Children, said it was crucial that such services were 'also extended out of school within their community - settings where children feel better placed to discuss their problems'.
