Browsing by Author "Tompuri, Pamela"

Goals. New student welfare law came into effect 1st of August 2014 and turned around the field of student welfare in Finland. The new student welfare law turns the focus of student welfare work from familiar individual- and problem focused student welfare towards preventative and community oriented student welfare. The worth of early support is also emphasized in the new law. The new law turns around the well-known, familiar working methods in student welfare and gives new frames for student welfare work bringing to schools a new policy for student welfare team work and how to plan, put into practise, document and evaluate student welfare work and what kind of services needs to be offered to the students. The purpose of this study was to examine documents made by four the most influential facets in the field of finnish education system (Ministry of Education and Culture, The Finnish National Board of Education, OAJ and The Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities) and according to them to evaluate what kind of starting points the new law gives to student welfare works practice, student welfare team work, personnel working in student welfare field and individual students student welfare services. In general the new law seems to bring needed improvement to student welfare field by emphasizing the preventative and community oriented student welfare work and by giving more power for a student and a parent to impact on student welfare. Methods. Research data in this study is collected from the documents written by the four main impacters on the field of finnish education about the new student welfare law. The law prepared by Ministry of Education and Cultures, the new curriculum for elementary and middle school, documents from OAJ about the new law and a question research made by The Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities are the data used in this research. The data is analyzed by using content analysis. Results and conclusions. The new student welfare law changes many largely used practical parts of the student welfare work adding the work load of student welfare. Also the big course of conduct change in emphasizing the preventive student welfare requires a lot of effort from the personnel working in the field of student welfare. it is possible the greater work load steels resources from the ones needing the student welfare services the most – the students in a need of support. There's a risk of lacking in educational point of view and the focus of student welfare changing too much towards social work. Also the personnel working in student welfare services might become burdened with too much work because of the changes in the student welfare law.