These are critical times for career guidance and counselling in education. The implementation of up-to-date guidance and counselling in education must not be seen as something separated from educational reform. There is a critical tension between progressive and regressive tendencies in both education and careers work. The case for reform requires careful attention leading to innovative solutions:

• • • How to combine critical thinking (‘how reliable and usefully do you know?’) and the development of career narrative?
• How to create a school culture in which emotions are not avoided but are seen as the starting point of significant learning? As significant learning presupposes pain (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), but too much pain will cause avoidance instead of learning.
• How can conflicting role demands be harmonized? Career teachers are confronted with two conflicting role demands (between ‘feedback’ and ‘feed-forward’) which demands that they have both a system orientation as well as a student-focused attitude. Teachers are confronted by conflicting demands with regards to qualities: on the one hand traditional demands that are defined primarily in output terms (e.g. less drop out) and on the other hand demands to be focused on the guidance process itself. A solution to this can probably not be found by setting out ‘empty’ (i.e. without theoretical underpinning) guidance roles (Network for Innovation in Career Guidance & Counselling in Europe, 2014)
• How to prevent the above mentioned problems from being ‘solved’ by outsourcing them? The persistent efforts by politicians to go towards marketisation of careers guidance have proven that this is a far from an imaginary tendency.
• How to create a strong career-learning environment? Schools are traditionally ‘turned inward’, but to create a career-learning environment cooperation between industry and schools on the basis of shared responsibility is required. Such cooperation is difficult to fully realise because it requires a taking leave of twentieth-century cooperation based on ‘divided’ responsibility. Such cooperation cannot be forced but it will also not happen without effort.

Together the articles in this International Symposium special issue encourage us to step back and think more about what constitutes effective twenty-first schooling. This also provides further stimuli to consider how and where can careers guidance and counselling policies, research and practice make a positive contribution to enriching individual’s lives.

Hughes, D. , Law, B. & Meijers, F. (2017) New school for the old school: careers guidance and counselling in education, British Journal of Guidance & Counselling.
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