Conflicting norms in Danish and Norwegian educational psychology counselling

With rising special education expenditures in many countries, educational psychology services (EPS) have been brought to the centre of renewed attention. Educational psychology counselling plays a vital role in facilitating inclusive education and addressing and fulfilling students’ mental health needs in the educational context. Like many public services, EPS work is characterized by a lack of resources and by high-stakes accountability. However, as the resource perspective is widely discussed in the literature and public debate, we turn our attention to a less explored topic – the mismatch or conflict between the EPS users’ expectations from the services and the accountability demands and the resources made available to the services from the authorities. Through open in-depth interviews with Danish and Norwegian EPS professionals, we identify three interrelated conflicting norms encountered by EPS professionals: a methodological conflict (whether to work on a system/organizational level or with individual evaluation), time and capacity conflicts (time pressure and limited resources) and a normative conflict between loyalty to what the EPS professionals perceive as a restricting system and loyalty to the children with and for whom they work. We argue that there is a need for more research that does not simply take the conflicting demands as a given premise but focuses on how these are experienced and dealt with.