Aura Rico, a Student Counsellor at Birkbeck reports on the training sessions for counsellors that was set up last year.
The UK has a healthy provision of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses for counsellors and psychotherapists. However, for some time it has been evident that there is a gap in the CPD offering for counsellors working in Higher Education, who due to high demand and limited resources, work to a short term counselling model – a maximum of six sessions per academic year.
The third session of the 2018-2019 series: ‘Working with Trauma and Sexual Abuse in Short-Term counselling’ in Higher Education facilitated by Christiane Sanderson who has written and worked extensively in this area. Christiane was a lecturer at Birkbeck for over twenty years.
It is well known that university support services are experiencing challenging times; across the sector, with ever-growing demand and longer waiting lists of students with serious and complex mental health problems who require specialist long-term interventions.
With secondary mental health services being cut or even closed, and waiting lists for psychiatric assessments and psychological therapy increasing, we are faced with unprecedented challenges.
In response to these challenging times, the Counselling Service at Birkbeck University created a space for training and dialogue on key topics such as risk, suicide and trauma. The intention was to open a space where different university counselling services across the UK could come together to learn from each other by discussing key topics and ultimately better serve the student population.
We were delighted to see the positive response of the sector to our first training series with over 200 attendees. We were fortunate enough to have experienced facilitators who engaged us all with fruitful discussions.
Given the high demand that our training programme generated and the positive feedback that we have received, we have decided to continue to provide a space for training and dialogue and we are delighted to be launching our 2019-2020 training series.
