The senior educational counsellor’s activity in response to pupils’ needs takes place within an institution characterised in secondary schools by a division of the labour involved in education. His or her counselling activities are studied in this paper in terms of their collective dimension, that is in terms of the system of relationships functioning within the educational team whatever the representations people may have because of the normative expectations of the educational community. The paper takes a comprehensive approach to listening to the different agents in the system, in order to highlight the interaction of the CPE-pupil relationship with its environment. The qualitative analysis of interviews with professionals regarding the way they counsel and follow their pupils’ developments was complemented with the administration and analysis of a confirmatory questionnaire. It transpires that the relationship with the pupil evolves according to the pedagogical time frame and allows new opportunities to emerge within the institution. The emergence of modes of cooperation between the different agents in the institution indicates a need to go beyond the modelisation of the tensions between individual and collective work in the institution.