All have counselling available. However, this ranges from individuals who have this as their sole function, to faculty who do this as part of their role.

• Personal counselling is available only once a week.
• Their course professors provide career and academic advice. As well the students can go to our Academic Referral Centre where they can get information about the entry requirements of post-secondary program, how to achieve these requirements, and how to apply to post-secondary. They can also access the personal and career counselling available in Student Services. For a fee, they can use the services of our Career Assessment Centre.
• Career and academic – faculty. Personal – refer to community agencies.
• We have a college counsellor assigned to our program who attends all our meetings, coffee circles and meets with the students at least six hours a week. Job Connect comes to the program for four hours every two weeks and helps our learners with employment issues. We have a counselling department that our students access to help make academic decisions (as well as faculty and staff in the program).

A wide variety of approaches are used in redirection. Most referred to the need for sensitivity in redirection and the importance of the acceptance of the need for redirection by the learner. Some of the responses:

• Much of the time spent on ‘goal setting’ is really on ‘redirecting’ from the original goal.
• It is available when necessary for a particular learner, sometimes in cooperation with a college counsellor. Usually requires sponsor approval which can prove quite difficult to obtain.
• The process is not as overt as this. We are sensitive to students’ aspirations. Referring them to our counsellor and her handling of the situations are done with some subtly and respect. Students may not know they are in a redirection process until their problems become clearer to them. For others, especially if it is a self-initiated process in response to changing circumstances, the options are certainly clarified by our faculty and counsellor. However, at some point the options are clearer.
• Our students are often referred to different educational programs and employability programs. This may happen through the teachers, the Academic Referral Centre or the office staff. The following is a list of frequent referrals: ESL courses, community-based literacy programs, the Adult High School, the EFA Resource Centre, our Job Readiness program, our Focus for Change program, etc.