Facing Conflicts and Violence in Schools – A Proposal for a New Occupation: The Mediation Counsellor

The present work aims to frame a proposal for a new occupation, equally associated with counselling and conflict management in Romanian educational settings. The study was conducted with Romanian school counsellors, through a series of focus-groups followed by a questionnaire-based survey. The findings suggest that proposing a new occupation, namely the mediation counsellor, answers the needs for specialized handling of conflicts and violence within the educational community. The school counselling practitioners who participated in data collection expressed their concerns regarding the frequency, the types and depth of potential conflicts in educational institutions, as well as their need for further training in conflict management. These findings support the intention of proposing the mediation counsellor as a specialized professional in the aforementioned directions, expected to collaborate with all educational actors for preventing school conflicts and violence.