Even though Germany had high hopes to reach the magic figures of one teacher-counselor per 500 students and one school psychologist for every 5,000, as of 2004 only 5 of 16 states had met this goal and 4 of 16 states had no teacher counselors at all (Strasser, 2013).
There were many challenges in setting up the school counseling system that Germany has. The biggest challenge is how education is controlled. Educational policy, including specific policy for school psychological services, is primarily controlled by the individual states, rather than the federal government as a whole. This means it is very difficult to set legislation across the board. Another challenge is the size of the effort. When Germany first decided to start having counseling available in schools, they had to put in years of research abroad in England and America just to learn how they trained counselors. Once they had done research, they had to spend more time and money creating experimental university courses to train teachers. They spent more resources to get a course created that could be taught nationwide. In addition to money, they had to find psychologists and researchers willing to put in the effort to create these courses.
Another large challenge is the idea of teacher-counselors. Teacher-counselors are often given extra training that isn’t the most extensive and they are still expected to manage their regular classes. Teacher-counselors often don’t get enough time to work with students and, if they aren’t trained well enough for a situation, they are often looked at as unhelpful. More training is of course available, or the help of a school psychologist, but even 20-30 years after the development of the teacher-counselor, specialization in counseling for education wasn’t available in German universities. It seems as if the teacher-counselor situation has frozen Germany into a period of stagnation in school counseling. From 1975-2004, the number of teacher-counselors in Germany has remained about the same (Strasser, 2013). Teacher-counselors can help, but ultimately, they are only trained a little better than the other teachers around them. School counseling is complex because it requires skills and knowledge in specific areas of both education and psychology and should be given more effort.
Another challenge with the development of school counseling in Germany is the other array of issues that eat up the government’s time and resources. School counseling is not the number one priority if there are other pressing issues. Refugees, immigration, and other social welfare issues make it hard to concentrate on taking school counseling to the next level.