A Call To All Stakeholders
Anshu Chaudhary & Vikas Baniwal
GUIDANCE AND COUNSELLING FOR CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS IN SCHOOLS by Namita Ranganathan and Toolika Wadhwa SAGE Publications, 2017, 253 pp., 295
November 2017, volume 41, No 11

The concerns of parents, teachers, and psychologists for children in schools has heightened in recent times because of various issues associated with violence, safety, sexuality, substance abuse, and career guidance, because of which the need to have competent mental health professionals to plan, organize, and conduct well-thought out mental health programmes in schools, is being felt more than ever before. Moreover, it is also being realized that in addition to school counsellors, the responsibility for providing students with necessary guidance and counselling support and an inclusive classroom must also be shared by all the teachers in the school. It is for this very reason that the issues related to guidance and counselling are featuring prominently in pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes. Given this background, the need for a high quality, comprehensive, contextually rooted, and theoretically sound text on guidance and counselling in schools was a pressing one. The text published by Sage serves the need of the hour very well. The book intends to place mental health concerns in the diversity of the Indian milieu, expressed in heterogeneity and plurality of region, philosophy, perspectives, and socio-economic context. The discussion is rooted in two noteworthy assumptions with which authors have weaved the diverse themes featured in this text.

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