Need Based Development of a School Counseling Program: Unconventional from Pakistan’s Perspective Farheen Nasir 1* and Rahila Khan 2 1 Teaching Faculty at SZABIST, Karachi, Pakistan and PhD. Scholar (Clinical Psychology at UoK) 2 Hamdard University, Principal of Army Public School-Central Ordnance Depot, Karachi, Pakistan Abstract: The aim of this study was to develop a comprehensive school counseling program which should be unconventional from the perspective of Pakistan where school counseling is not very common, while considering the needs of the school’s students and later to evaluate its outcomes. The program has been developed in Army Public School – COD, Karachi, under Army Public Schools and Colleges Systems (APSACS), Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The school setting comprises of around 1900 students including teaching staff of 126. The age range of students is 3-16 years, studying from kindergarten to secondary level. The research design is descriptive in nature which comprise of naturalistic observation and questionnaire formats with convenient sampling. The survey result of teachers shows encouraging upshot. Parental rating is high for various counseling lectures designed for parents. Students’ feedback for the programs arranged for them lies within high range and follow-up of the referred cases of students shows average improvement. Hence it can be concluded that through the introduction of a comprehensive counseling program along with the hiring of a trained counselor e.g. a clinical psychologist in a school setting positive changes can be expected in the form of enhanced awareness which can be practically applied for better educational, social and personal outcomes of the students in connection with teachers and parents as well. Keywords: Awareness, counseling, school, teachers, parents & students 1. Introduction In today’s world of advancement it is becoming highly crucial to keep a check and balance on the growing perspective of youth, not just on their physical growth but also on their mental, emotional and character growth. School is a setting which provides the first roof for the over all development of youngsters and at the same time it is also the place where most of the academic, emotional, social and vocational problems arise. A student/school counselor can offer benefits not only to individual students with special needs but also to raise the working environment of the school on the whole. Such a school environment helps to cater the over all personality development of its students along with providing opportunity to the administration, teachers and parents to enhance their knowledge and skills in the areas of child and human development. In Pakistan mostly schools do not have any counseling facility for the students and even few high schools or colleges which provide this facility mostly focus on career development only. But it is important to understand that before emphasizing on career often students’ special needs have to be resolved first like anxiety, depression, shyness, stammering, aggression etc. and only then effective grooming of their individual personalities can take place. As Wasif (2010) reported in a newsletter article while interviewing the director and head of career counseling at Roots School System, Rawalpindi that psychological counseling is also required for the students apart from career counseling. A cross sectional study was conducted in US (Mason et al., 2002) to check the views of school counselors about counseling outcomes and their * Corresponding author: Tel. +92 321 383 1810 E-mail: drfnasir@live.com 236 2012 International Conference on Education and Management Innovation IPEDR vol.30 (2012) © (2012) IACSIT Press, Singapore