Service Model: Definition, Features, Advantages and More

Service Model

The service model is characterized by the direct intervention of a specialized sectoral team or service on a reduced group of subjects.

The model of services has been the most widespread in public institutions, serving as a reference framework and systematization of the work of professionals from different fields (education, counseling, psychology, medicine, social work, etc.). Furthermore, it tries to respond to social needs and demands, structuring, and evolving the services themselves.

Main Features

• They tend to be public and social in nature.
• They are usually located outside educational centers, and their implementation is zonal and sectoral. Therefore, it carries out action by experts external to the educational institution.
• They act by functions, rather than by objectives.
• And also, they focus on solving the needs of students with difficulties and at-risk (therapeutic and problem-solving nature).
• They are usually individual and punctual.
• And, they act more on the problem than on the context that generates the problem.
• They act more for functions than for objectives.

This model proposes a direct intervention based on a personal helping relationship, eminently therapeutic, which aims to satisfy personal and educational needs, using the interview as a strategic resource to face individualized intervention, generally of a clinical nature.

Service Model Facilitates

• Synergy and targeting: A common and shared language among the organization’s leaders, contact and support staff, customer-oriented.
• Agility: Design and implement simple processes that facilitate the access and use of clients’ products and services.
• Innovation Ecosystems: Promotion of a culture of innovation for continuous improvement and the design of new services and products.
• Empathy and Personalization: Understanding clients’ real needs with an awareness of the importance of establishing close and trustworthy relationships.

Historical Development

Advantages of Service Model

The main advantages of the service model are:

Until the end of the 70s, these services had a strong therapeutic character and disconnected from the school’s educational process. Still, later they gradually adopted a more psycho-pedagogical approach and greater coordination with the educational centers’ programs.

• Provide information to educational agents
• It favors the distribution and adjustment of students based on external criteria defined by the system
• The guidance team collaborates with the tutor, teachers, and families.
• Connects the center with community services.

Drawbacks

• The team has little time to advise and train the teachers who perform the tutoring function.
• His schedule does not facilitate approaching work with the family and the community.
• Activities are often limited to diagnosis by psychometric tests.
• Little knowledge and connection with the school institution.
• Decontextualization of the problems and their own interventions.
• Its functions are predefined, so objects are forgotten.

Its approach is basically remedial and therapeutic; therefore, it does not incorporate development and global intervention or prevention principles.

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