What is counselling?

Our qualified counsellors are here to confidentially support all University students through one-to-one counselling, events and access to self help. We also train University staff to support their students.

We aim through our service to help students work through their difficulty, understand themselves better and find ways of managing their situation, offering evidence-based self help resources, workshops, one to one counselling and consultation and training for staff.

Key activities

We support all matriculated students by providing:

  • signposts to evidence-based self help resources
  • a programme of workshops and support groups
  • access to short term one-to-one counselling

We also provide consultation and development training courses for University staff.

Helping you to understand yourself

Counselling involves a series of sessions where the counsellor and student talk about the student’s issues and feelings. The sessions take place at a regular, agreed time. Counselling may involve talking about life events, feelings, emotions, relationships, ways of thinking and patterns of behaviour. The counsellor will listen, encourage and empathise, but will also challenge to help the student to see their issues more clearly or in a different way.

Counselling is not about giving advice or opinions, nor is it a friendly chat with a friend. The counsellor helps the student to understand themselves better and find their own solutions to resolve or cope with their situation.

Our counsellors

Our team are all experienced professionally qualified counsellors in line with our policy on clinical need and counselling provision.  

We adhere to the Ethical Framework of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy as well as following our own Code of Practice on Confidentiality and Data Protection. We give a copy of this Code of Practice to every student who refers themselves to us, before their initial assessment.