The Ministry of Education is strengthening its efforts to address suicide in schools by equipping and upskilling counsellors, school heads, teachers and volunteers on general counselling and behaviour management.
The Minister for Education, Heritage and Arts, Hon. Dr Mahendra Reddy said nine national counselling workshops will be conducted in the Western, Central and Northern Division as part of efforts to engage with students who may are facing problems at home or school.
The workshops are conducted by Vijay Kumar, a prospective PHD student, a school counsellor and a psychologist from the New South Wales Education Department in Australia.
Mr Kumar has given up two weeks to provide voluntarily service, running workshops throughout the education divisions in Fiji.
Dr Reddy said there are plans to train school prefects and class captains to interact with fellow students and identify early signs of depression amongst students and raise them with their school heads or counsellors.
“We want to train our prefects on how to identify students facing issues, the comments from children as well as signs and then raise it with the head teacher or counsellor. Then we can immediately talk to the child and if need be, call his or her parents to resolve the issues,” Dr Reddy said.
Dr Reddy raised concerns that while counselling comes with dealing with children in trouble, there are many students who will not come forward on their own to seek counselling.
“We will run workshops throughout Fiji in every school next year and those who are trained now, will provide counselling training to other teachers and prefects in their schools. The prefects will be our eyes and ears on the ground.”
Dr Reddy also reiterated the need for parents to spend quality time with their children.
“This issue involves stakeholders who are not within our control. Within our control is the school environment, teachers and students but parents are not in our control. They are important stakeholders and we can appeal to them to spend quality time with their children, to allow their children to share their problems and issues. That will make a lot of difference,” Dr Reddy said.
Mr Kumar said the workshop will allow participants to understand human nature so they are able to deal with students in need of assistance.
“Another aspect is engaging with adolescents and letting the parents know what are some of the changes that our teenagers are going through. We are also looking at a plan where the parents come up to the school and work with teachers and principals in talking about issues affecting children,” Mr Kumar said.
“Parents need to take a more proactive role and spend quality time with their children, especially now with the technology in the world. We are looking at risk factors and common occurrences. We are trying to identify even those children who are withdrawn and try to help them.”
Meanwhile, 55 principals, teachers and counsellors took part in the counselling training at Suva Vocational School today with more to get trained in the North tomorrow.