Counselling service Hearing You provides counselling for pupils from year 1-8 in 23 schools in Dunedin and townships as far afield as Clinton and Lawrence.
One of the three counsellors employed by the service, India Hughes-Chang, said the service was a vital response to the closing of the children’s mobile counselling service ChatBus in January 2022.
Mrs Hughes-Chang said there was a dire need for counselling in primary schools.
"The teachers are not given the resources or the time they need to support children and all the complex challenges they face in the modern world," she said.
She came across issues such as anxiety, anger, grief and loss that could affect a child’s behaviour.
"Living in a post Covid world, moving towns or parents separating can cause a lot of grief and loss and anxiety can come with that from living between two families."
Although the impact of the service was not immediate, she could definitely see the long-term effect it had on children as they grew up, she said.
"It’s especially meaningful when we hear a couple of years later, ‘that helped me a lot’ or ‘that changed my child’s world’.
"We’re the ambulance at the top of the cliff."
Eight Catholic schools in Dunedin were funded by the Mercy Charitable Outreach Fund and Catholic Social Services supported the service by providing management and structure.
The rest of the 23 schools had scraped together funding from a variety of places and there were still many schools that did not have a service available.
"There’s so many schools that need this service desperately but are unable to access funding because of barriers," Mrs Hughes-Chang said.
In the past two years the service had helped hundreds of pupils across the region, she said.
