Wellbeing Education - Professional Training in Therapeutic Wellbeing Practice for Children and Young People
Professional Training in Humanistic and Integrative Therapeutic Counselling Across the Life Course
Professional Therapeutic Counselling Practice
Year Three
Diploma in Therapeutic Counselling for Children and Young People
LEVEL 6
Diploma in Therapeutic Counselling for Children and Young People
Year three applies the knowledge, skills and research competencies acquired in the intermediate course to writing a professional case study on therapeutic counselling with a child or young person. This includes considering child and adolescent development in the assessment and collaborative formulation, considering a wide variety of presenting issues and client needs in therapeutic counselling.
Students are supported to explore the themes of social injustice, including the impact on mental health, individual and community wellbeing. The use of self, creative and relational processes and research forums consolidates learning about the therapeutic relationship and the evaluation of outcomes in therapeutic counselling with children and young people.
This includes 21 days on weekends and a 30-hour compulsory online case study support module for one weekday evening
There are two journal entries, three practical assessments and a case study included in the professional training.
Course Content
Module 9: Integrative and Relational Skills
This module explores in depth, the practice-based implications of creative and relational approaches to therapeutic counselling. This integrates and consolidates the knowledge and experience from the rest of the curriculum, applying and evaluating theory through practice-based learning in placements. The emphasis is on compassionate enquiry, embedding context, diversity and equity in therapeutic counselling, exploring theories of change and the themes of power, privilege and positioning. This approach to the whole person and whole intelligence, includes embodied relational care, exploring world views, identity and lived experience in the therapeutic encounter and dialogue. This explores the dynamics of power, intergenerational trauma, legacy burdens and moral injury, the impacts of social inequality, discrimination, marginalisation, structural and systemic exclusion. This includes reflection and analysis of issues with critical self-reflexivity, including exploration of unconscious bias, anti-racist, anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive practice. This includes analytical psychology, active imagination, archetypes and the collective unconscious in adult and child mental health, drawing from a rich array of depth psychological perspectives, with reference to internal family systems, nurturing wellbeing capacities, spirituality, ritual, rites of passage and preparation for endings.
Module 10A: Therapeutic Counselling: Teenagers and Young People
This module underlines, reviews, revises and consolidates the competencies required for humanistic and integrative therapeutic counselling skills as applied to working with teenagers and young people, whilst also continuing with placements and learning across the life course. This includes working directly with teenagers with consideration of their personal, social and developmental issues. This highlights the specialist standards of proficiency for contemporary therapeutic practice in working with adolescents, their presenting issues, and unique stressors, which may include family, education, peer challenges, and their individual journey towards independence and adulthood. This includes safeguarding and risk assessment considerations within a landscape of ever-changing policy frameworks, how to establish and maintain a therapeutic relationship, and inspire self-responsibility, self-care, and self-awareness.
Module 10B: Case Study Support: Children and Young People
This module includes a live online component to support students with their case studies. This enables students to review, revise, consolidate and apply the teaching from previous modules of the training to their identified child for their case study research in child therapeutic counselling. The case study support module provides opportunities to share their case work with peers and to engage in case consultation and review. Students participate in research forums, accessing ongoing supervision, with commitment to lifelong learning, professional development and regular reporting on their practice. Students work in accordance with professional requirements for quality assurance and fitness to practice. This component of the training provides the opportunity to review all previous curriculum content and apply it to writing up their research in case studies, evidencing their competencies for working with children and young people. Trainees are required to complete placements with a minimum of 100 hours across the age ranges, attending regular supervision, with a minimum ratio of 1:8 sessions, culminating in writing a case study.
Module 10C: The Site of Integration: Personal Growth and Community
The site of Integration is delivered throughout years three and four and it encourages the use of self in therapeutic counselling across the life course. This refers to the context of each individual’s subjective lived experience, where an integrative process is continually enabled towards wholeness. This unites the different modules through a synthesis of knowledge, skills, understanding, critical perspectives and personal experience. This module demonstrates how the use of self can be applied in relational therapeutic practice, drawing on theories of transference and countertransference, developmentally needed person-to-person and transpersonal aspects of the relational field. It draws on the unitive aspects of the humanistic and integrative tradition in psychotherapy and provides an emphasis on the impacts of social injustice on mental health and emotional wellbeing.
Outcomes of the Advanced Diploma
On completion of the third year students are able to demonstrate an integration of knowledge and experience with the ability to apply critical evaluation skills and to maintain professional and ethical practice.
This penultimate year provides the internal resources, creative abilities and evolving compassionate presence with the necessary research skills to move towards the final advanced stage of training.
