Time limited focussed counselling is available to help you manage and process a wide range of issues and challenges that may or may not be connected to student life, but that are impacting on your ability to achieve your academic and personal goals. Our Counselling Service is here to try and help you gain understanding and insight into what you may be experiencing.

The Counselling Service is free, confidential, and separate from your college and course. Our counsellors are not there to provide answers, rather to help you to find your own solutions. Counselling can be helpful for a wide range of personal, emotional, and relational issues. Talking and thinking collaboratively with a professional counsellor often allows for more clarity and new perspectives which can lead to viewing and dealing with thoughts, feelings, relationships, challenges, and situations differently.

Benefits of counselling

• Counselling can help with longstanding concerns, new difficulties or if you simply have a feeling that something ‘isn’t right’.
• Counselling aims to help you to build your resources and to promote change that will enable you to fulfil your academic and personal potential.
• Counselling can be useful in reviewing strategies which might have previously helped you manage alone, but which may now no longer be working.
• It can be a relief to tell someone who is impartial, about difficulties you are struggling with on your own.
• A counsellor listens carefully and without judgment, brings objectivity and experience of dealing with problems of all kinds to support you as an individual.
• Counsellors won’t tell you what to do but can help you start to make sense of difficulties you are having and work with you to identify ways to cope and live which are more helpful.

Why Counselling may not be appropriate

In some instances, Counselling with the Student Wellbeing Service may not be possible or the most appropriate support for you. It could be that:

• Longer-term and/or more specialised therapy is indicated from the initial assessment
• Medical issues need to be prioritised and referral to medical services is warranted. For students residing outside of the UK, this will involve signposting you to local emergency services or support networks
• You are based in a country with specific counselling licensing which regulate the provision of counselling, and which are incompatible with the UK legal and regulatory requirements.

If counselling provision is not possible or appropriate, alternative sources of support, internal and external to the university, will be explored with you. These may include:

• Broader Student Wellbeing Service support including online support, workshops and group events, and self-help
• Mental Health Adviser support
• Broader university pastoral/ academic support services
• Referrals to other relevant, external services, such as NHS-based services (if UK based), and longer-term, specialist therapeutic services where appropriate
• Help with signposting to local services in the country where you are currently based (outside of the UK).

Our Counsellors

Our counsellors have significant experience, are all professionally qualified and either accredited or working towards accreditation with a recognised professional body. We work within the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) guidelines and the Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions.

All the counsellors in our team offer time-limited, holistic support and work integratively, which means that they draw on tools and strategies from a variety of counselling and therapeutic approaches.

To access support and to find out what support might be appropriate for you register with Student Wellbeing.