Background. To support students with personal, often health-related problems, and also to prevent these problems, there are six support systems available in the Austrian school system: school psychologists, school physicians, school counsellors, personal and vocational consultants, school social workers and youth coaches. Objectives. In this article, we show supply gaps and redundancies of services provided by these support systems and identify hindering factors for their successful collaboration and coordination. Methods. Data are based on 26 expert interviews that were on average about 1 h in length. The interviews were transcribed and assessed by means of a qualitative content analysis. Results. The identified supply gaps were: ambiguous legal norms for the support of chronically ill students, a lack of school psychologists and school social workers, a lack of cost-free psychotherapy and supply of child and youth psychiatrists, as well as too little awareness of the problem of child and adolescent poverty. Redundancies can be seen for vocational consultancy and uncoordinated interventions to prevent mobbing and violence in schools. Hindering factors for collaboration and coordination in the Austrian school system are: a high fluctuation of staff, varying sponsorships, obligation to confidentiality and data privacy, lacking time resources for networking and too little mutual respect amongst the different professional groups. Conclusions. Based on the results, conditions for better collaboration and coordination of these support systems are framed.
