After eight years as a Resource Teacher: Learning and Behaviour (RTLB), Lavinia Robyns is retraining as a student guidance counsellor, with a little help from HealthCarePlus and its Grants for Good program.
After two decades teaching in primary classrooms, Lavinia Robyns changed tack and started working as a Resource Teacher: Learning and Behaviour (RTLB) in the Central Auckland region. This Ministry of Education role involves supporting several schools in the region.
Working under the Ministry’s learning support umbrella, Lavinia and her colleagues are called in when schools in the region have exhausted their own strategies.
“Schools come to us when they need additional support around learning and behaviours,” she says.
The work is collaborative rather than fix-it: over roughly two terms she partners with teachers and whānau, supporting teams to implement strategies and to build capacity to support students.
Over the past five years, one pattern stood out.
“I have seen an increasing impact of anxiety and distress on school attendance, learning and behaviour,” Lavinia says. “Time and again, students with access to a skilled guidance counsellor showed real change in their sense of self, sense of belonging and how they engaged with the school. I knew that counselling needed to be part of the solution.”
So Lavinia enrolled in a part-time Master’s of Counselling program at the University of Waikato. The university is the only program in Aotearoa with a sole focus on Narrative Therapy – completing two 30-point papers alongside her full-time RTLB role.
“I chose this university program as I am really interested in the narrative therapy approach,” says Lavinia. “It says that the person is not the problem, but that the problem is the problem.” The philosophy holds that identity isn’t innate but shaped by the stories people tell, and the stories told about them.
“There might be young people who’ve got into trouble and those reputations are circulating about them,” says Lavinia. “The narrative therapy approach helps people see that there’s another side to that… other environments where different strengths can play out.”
Balancing full-time work and study, and supporting her two children through their own university journeys, is no small feat, which is where the HealthCarePlus Grant for Good proved so helpful. The funding towards course fees has made a tangible difference.
And for Lavinia, the grant means more than just the dollars.
“Receiving the grant has encouraged me to invest in my own professional growth and embark on this new professional pathway.”
For now, Lavinia wears two hats – as counsellor and as RTLB. But the long-term goal is to shift gradually into student counselling within a school environment, where she hopes to build more connected, inclusive and supportive school communities, one young person at a time.
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