At Avenor, we strive to provide our students with genuine support in choosing their educational path beyond Avenor and selecting a career through a state-of-the-art education and counselling programme, comparable to those offered by the world’s top schools.
As part of our counselling team, Louisa Dăscălescu, a History and English teacher, has recently earned the title of THE Accredited Counsellor—a certification that has granted her access to the latest insights and solutions to help students make informed decisions about their academic and professional future.
We invite you to hear directly from Louisa about her experience and the new approaches she brings to the student counselling process.
You recently became a THE Accredited Counsellor. What motivated you to follow this course?
I believed THE Counsellor Accreditation Programme would give me access to expert opinion and experiences, feedback from schools with growing graduate bodies, and advice on how to best utilise technology to support counselling. It really delivered on what it promised and tackled the challenges students face both presently and in the future in a way that felt both informed and cutting edge.
What will the future of work look like? How can young people build skills that will help them navigate it? What role does higher education play in this future? How can we reassure and support young people?
These were some of the key questions the course engaged with that I found particularly compelling. It was also rather reassuring to know that students all over the world have similar questions and uncertainties.
If we think about how fast technology has developed over the last twenty years, we can begin to understand the difficulty of picking a career when we can only guess what the next twenty years will look like!
What are the key challenges students face when choosing a university and career path, and how does Avenor support them in making informed decisions?
As a teenager and (in all likelihood) throughout our lives, it is daunting to choose what direction your life should take, to know whether that choice is ‘right’, and how to filter through an overwhelming number of possibilities.
American poet and author Sylvia Path presents this challenge through the following metaphor in The Bell Jar: “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked…I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest.”
For Avenor students, our LOTC programme and counselling is focused on helping students be knowledgeable about themselves, their interests and their skills so they are ready to prune their own “green fig tree” with confidence in their aspirations, values, and abilities. We introduce young people to a range of post-18 options and our counselling for higher education is focused on ensuring students find their ‘best fit’ university or institution. Ultimately, we want students to understand they’re making choices for now and not forever; choosing one thing now doesn’t mean losing “all the rest.”
How has this accreditation deepened your expertise, and what new insights do you bring to students as they explore their academic and career options?
I’ve been in a career and university counselling role for 6 years: above all else, this accreditation gave me a point of comparison. Listening to lectures, interviews with experts, and projects by counsellors from all over the world helped me assess if what we’re doing at Avenor meets or exceeds the standard of career guidance globally.
Through a triangulation of our approach, THE Career Accreditation Programme’s suggestions and the Career Mark Award evaluation, it became clear that Avenor is offering students a bespoke programme that is both data-led and personalised.
As someone with luddite tendencies, I also feel the programme pushed me out of my comfort zone and really made me consider the added value AI can have in the context of counselling and the university research process.
How can career guidance make a real difference in a student’s university or career choice?
It’s always helpful to have a guide when navigating new experiences, and that’s true for choosing a post-18 pathway, as well as going on holiday somewhere unfamiliar.
Career guidance is there as a pillar of support: primarily, it strives to be impartial. While students face the pressure of expectation from different internal and external sources, a counsellor can offer well-informed feedback that aligns with the aspirations of students. All counsellors take the application journey with each student and family; supporting the process of identifying entry requirements and examinations, or guiding and reviewing motivational essays.
However, school-based career guidance creates networks and bridges for students that can substantially improve the quality and efficiency of university applications by bringing the team around the student: keeping parents informed, building relationships with prospective universities, working with the school administration to ease the logistics of applying to university, and liaising SLT (as I explained in this article) to ensure policies and student needs are met.
At Avenor, these factors are further enhanced by the fact we know our students well and offer individual career guidance meetings for students and families alongside the four year LOTC programme.
