The goal of this work is to determine the difficulties that high school-aged youth face from the perspective of high school professional associates, and which social workers could adequately address. This leads to a research question - what challenges and difficulties do professional associates face in their direct work with students and their parents, which could social workers adequately address? Therefore, the purpose of this research was to determine whether there is a need for employment of social workers as professional associates in secondary schools in the Republic of Croatia. Thirteen professional associates working in secondary schools in the City of Zagreb and Zagreb County participated in the research. The results show that there are a number of difficulties that young people face on their personal and family level and in the school environment. The most prominent difficulties are difficulties in the field of mental health, which are manifested in the form of anxiety and depression, lack of parenting skills and children's competences, and lack of work habits and willingness to learn. From the deviant forms of behavior, professional associates single out physical and verbal peer violence and increased consumption of psychoactive substances. The lack of parental competence is mainly reflected in the neglect of children's mental and physical health and their needs, the absence of appropriate boundaries and overprotection. Among the family problems, unfavorable socioeconomic situation, divorce of parents, alcoholism in the family, violent behavior and the child's life separated from the parents due to the need to place the child in a home for upbringing or a home for children without adequate parental care are mentioned. The professional associates largely support the employment of social workers in the regular education system and are well aware of the duties of a school social worker. As the main obstacle to employment, they cite a lack of political interest to invest their resources in new jobs, resistance from other helping professions due to fear that the aforementioned will lead to reduced employability of their profession and insufficient public information and stigmatization of the social work profession. Based on the theoretical basis, examples of good practice and processed results, it can be concluded that there is a great need for the employment of social workers in schools and their clear role in educational systems around the world, but that there are a number of challenges that the profession will have to deal with in order to ensure its place in schools with the aim of increasing the well-being of children, young people, families, communities and society in general.