Communal student welfare in basic education

Assessment objective

The main question of the assessment was whether the communal student welfare at Helsinki’s comprehensive schools is in line with the Student Welfare Act. This was assessed by determining whether communal student welfare has taken into account the statutory preventive activities, whether monitoring methods have been set up for communal student welfare and whether the welfare officer and psychologist resources of student welfare are compliant with regulations.

Conclusions

Communal student welfare in basic education is mainly in line with the Student Welfare Act, but the pupils’ right to receive psychologist and welfare officer services in student welfare was not realised within the statutory deadline. The systematic planning of communal student welfare and its implementation in multidisciplinary cooperation between the Education Division and the Social Services and Health Care Division have been increased. Student welfare has been monitored through in-house supervision as prescribed by law. The guardians’ participation in the meetings of the student welfare group was only realised at approximately a third of the schools. The school-specific monitoring of pupils’ well-being did not cover all schools.

The City’s student welfare provides welfare officer and psychologist services to both schools run by the City and private and state schools, but no information was available on the distribution of the workload of welfare officers and psychologists between the schools run by different parties.