The Past and Present of School Counseling in Taiwan: From 'Only People with Problems Go There' to 'Everyone Needs It but There Is Not Enough'

30-second overview: Taiwan's school counseling work traces back to the introduction of nine-year compulsory education in 1968; over more than half a century of evolution, the 2014 Student Guidance Act established a three-tiered counseling framework — developmental, interventional, and treatment-level. But research in counseling and guidance indicates that Taiwan's school counseling roles and functions remain close to where the United States was in the 1940s to 1970s: emphasizing individual psychological counseling, primarily serving "students with problems," with the professional identity of counseling teachers remaining ambiguous. A 2025 investigation by the Reporter for Juveniles exposed the brutal frontline reality: dedicated counselors are overloaded, visiting psychologists rotate across schools and cannot provide continuous care, and students fear being labeled if they enter the counseling room.

The Weight of the Words "Counseling Room"

In Taiwan's elementary and junior high schools, the "counseling room" carries a particular stigma.

For many students, walking into the counseling room means "I have a problem." This impression runs deep: the counseling room is where students with "adjustment difficulties" go, where teachers send students they can no longer manage, a mechanism that only activates after something has gone wrong. Those who walk in voluntarily worry about their classmates finding out, worry about being labeled as "mentally ill"¹.

This impression formed for historical reasons. Taiwan's school counseling work has long operated under a "remedial-reactive" orientation: waiting for problems to emerge before intervening, serving specific students as the target population, with counseling teachers' roles narrowed to being specialists who "handle problem students"².

But in the United States, school counseling has undergone 120 years of evolution — long past this "remedial" model and into a "comprehensive program" model, with the goal of serving every student's academic, career, and social-emotional development. Taiwan's counseling system now stands at the transformational crossroads that America took sixty years to traverse².

From Vocational Guidance to Comprehensive Programs: America's 120 Years

Wu Chih-yi and Lin Shu-hua's 2017 research identifies six phases in the professionalization of school counseling and therapy in the United States²:

Phase 1: Vocational Guidance (1900s). Frank Parsons — honored as the "father of guidance" — established a vocational bureau in Boston in 1908, helping young people understand the fit between their own capacities and the vocational environment. The origins of guidance lay in helping people find the right work.

Phase 2: Educational Guidance (1920s). John Brewer proposed "education as guidance," expanding the focus from vocational to educational guidance. Meanwhile, the flourishing of psychological assessment shifted guidance work toward an individual, diagnostic, psychometric orientation.

Phase 3: Psychological Counseling (1940s). Carl Rogers published Counseling and Psychotherapy in 1942, proposing person-centered counseling. The term "counseling" replaced the directive-sounding "guidance" as the core concept of the field.

Phase 4: Specialized Casework (1970s). Education funding cuts made school counselors the first category subject to layoffs, since their work was difficult to quantify as performance outcomes. Counselors were pressed into administrative duties, and their professional identity and recognition became muddled².

Phase 5: Guidance Program Development (1980s). Scholars began defining school counseling work through "programs," expecting to provide developmental services for every student through systematic program design. Guidance became an important component of school education rather than a supplementary appendage.

Phase 6: Comprehensive School Counseling Programs (2000s to present). The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) established a national model in 2003, proposing that school counselors should structure 80% of their time around direct service modes including guidance curriculum, individual student planning, and responsive services. Counseling goals span four dimensions: academic development, career development, personal/social development, and competency development².

The evolutionary trajectory of these six phases reveals one thing: the journey from "serving only people with problems" to "serving everyone" took America more than a century.

Where Has Taiwan Reached?

Taiwan's school counseling work began with the implementation of nine-year compulsory education in 1968. The Ministry of Education established "Guidance Activity" classes and "Guidance Activity Teachers" in junior high schools, providing students with vocational guidance, academic guidance, and life guidance².

Over more than half a century, Taiwan's counseling work was shaped by several pivotal events. Relevant research identifies multiple turning points: the promotion of the "Six-Year Plan for Guidance Work," the implementation of pilot programs for "Establishing a New System for Student Guidance," the establishment of the "Integrated Activities Learning Domain" under the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum, the passage of the Psychologists Act, and the proposal of the "Elementary and Junior High School Organizational Restructuring and Human Resource Planning Pilot Program"².

The most far-reaching of these was the passage of the Psychologists Act in 2001. This law established the professional licensing system for "counseling psychologists," but simultaneously made the role of guidance teachers more awkward: they perform counseling work in schools yet may not hold counseling psychologist licenses. And the licensed counseling psychologists are mostly not employed within the school system.

According to the Seventh Republic of China Education Yearbook, school affairs and guidance personnel across county and city governments slowly increased from 70 in the 1994 school year to 95 in the 2011 school year. Starting in 2011, the Ministry of Education, under the amended Article 10 of the Elementary School Education Act, subsidized all counties and cities to establish Student Guidance Counseling Centers to coordinate the deployment, training, and supervision of full-time professional guidance personnel¹².

In 2014, with the advocacy of various sectors of society, the Legislative Yuan passed the Student Guidance Act. This law established the three-tiered framework of "developmental guidance," "interventional guidance," and "treatment-level guidance," and stipulated that from 2017 onward, schools at all levels would need to hire dedicated student guidance teachers or professional guidance personnel³.

But between the passage of legislation and its implementation on the ground, a vast gap remains. Yearbook data shows that even by 2011, the counties and cities with the fewest personnel (Hsinchu City, Penghu County, and Kinmen County) had only 1 to 2 people responsible for all student affairs and guidance work in the entire county¹².

An Overloaded Frontline

The Reporter for Juveniles special investigation in April 2025 exposed three major difficulties in the dedicated counselor system¹.

First, visiting psychologists rotate across schools and cannot provide continuous service. A single psychologist is simultaneously responsible for multiple schools, with limited weekly time at each. When students finally summon the courage to enter the counseling room, they may be told "the psychologist isn't here today."

Second, suicide reporting has gaps. The design of the reporting system means some students with suicidal ideation are not identified and referred in time. Behind a single suicide event there are often more children who have not yet acted but are struggling — and the existing system cannot systematically catch these signals⁴.

Third, students fear being labeled. Even when counseling resources exist in a school, students still hesitate to enter the counseling room for fear of classmates finding out, of receiving extra teacher attention, of being considered "mentally ill." This labeling effect means the students who most need help are the least willing to seek it¹.

The Reporter's early 2026 investigation into uncertified substitute teachers exposed a more fundamental problem: when the proportion of uncertified substitute teachers in Taiwan's elementary schools had risen from 37.6% to 56.4%, these teachers — who had not received complete teacher training — are almost entirely unprepared to handle inclusive education, special-needs students, and how to identify and refer mental health risks⁵.

The Super Teacher's Breakdown

In the Reporter for Juveniles feature, one story made people stop.

Liu Wei-ting, a dedicated counseling teacher at Xianxi Junior High School in Changhua County, once received the "Super Teacher" award. He had devoted himself to counseling for many years and was the most reliable support in the eyes of colleagues and students. But there was one child he could not save — and that became the final weight that broke him. Liu Wei-ting went from being a Super Teacher to becoming a client in psychological counseling himself⁶.

This story distills the core contradiction of the dedicated counselor's situation: they are the ones in school responsible for catching others when they fall — but when they themselves break apart, there is no one to catch them. Chen Hui-hsueh's 2024 doctoral dissertation, Teachers Are Made of Glass (教師就是玻璃心), called this phenomenon "teacher professional vulnerability": teachers harbor intense feelings of responsibility and mission, but when they cannot meet expectations or face criticism, the vulnerability in their professional identity is exposed⁷.

The vulnerability of counseling teachers is sharper than that of ordinary teachers. The work they handle directly touches students' safety of life, exceeding the scope of ordinary academic problems. Every delayed judgment, every insufficient resource, every gap in the system — each may correspond to a real child.

From "Remedial" to "Comprehensive": How Far Is There Still to Go?

The researchers conclude with four recommendations, each directly addressing a structural deficiency in Taiwan's school counseling².

First, provide comprehensive counseling services for all students. Past American guidance work focused on supporting high-risk students, investing more time in individual and group counseling. But as education reform and the essential nature of education have been continuously articulated, school counseling teachers — as members of the educational system — should serve every student's academic, career, social-emotional, and personal development.

Second, emphasize the collection and analysis of counseling outcome data to demonstrate performance. In Taiwan's 2003 amendments to the Elementary School Education Act and the 2005 amendments to the Senior High School Act, the counseling teacher staffing structure was once deleted, and counseling teachers faced a crisis of elimination. Only by demonstrating the value of counseling work through performance data can this profession ensure it is not cut².

Third, establish measurable performance indicators for students' holistic development. The 2014 ASCA national model clearly defined a set of indicators that can be used to assess students' competency and literacy development in three dimensions: personal/social, academic, and career. Taiwan has not yet reached consensus on the content of the professional competencies expected of school counseling teachers².

Fourth, emphasize the cultivation of professional competencies for school counseling teachers. Taiwan has not yet secured broad recognition of the quality and effectiveness of school counseling curricula, nor has it developed consensus on constructing domestic standards for school counseling professional competencies. There is still a considerable distance from establishing an independent school counseling professional program².

In 2025, a joint investigation by the Reporter for Juveniles and the Taiwan Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that 1.3% of elementary and junior high students had experienced the nonconsensual distribution of private sexual images — these students' self-harm risk was 5.16 times that of ordinary children⁴. Child and adolescent mental health problems are worsening at a pace faster than institutional development.

Taiwan's school counseling rooms have already moved beyond the role of "a room you enter only when you have a problem." They are becoming the most important — and most overburdened — frontline in the school. The question is: how many resources are we willing to invest so this frontline does not collapse?

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