The School of Counselling

📸 Snap. Here's our September 2026 flex (the good kind), fresh off the camera.

Our CPCAB-approved courses. Delivered live, online, and face to face via Zoom:

LEVEL 2
📆 Intensive: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday

🌙 Standard evening: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday

☀️ Friday morning, Saturday morning

LEVEL 3
📆 Intensive: Friday

🌙 Standard evening: Wednesday

More days are on their way 👀

Counselling and Psychotherapy Central Awarding Body (CPCAB)

You have always been the one people talk to.

Not because you sought it out. Because something about the way you listen makes people feel safe enough to say the things they do not say elsewhere.

The friend who calls at midnight. The colleague who closes your office door. The family member who finds the words for the first time in your company.

You probably did not choose this. It chose you.

Counselling training does not ask for an academic background or a psychology degree. It asks for something that cannot be taught from scratch. The capacity to be genuinely present with another person. The willingness to listen without an agenda.

If you have been doing a version of this informally for most of your adult life, you are not starting from zero.

You might just need to start.

Read the full piece here: https://www.schoolofcounselling.com/post/counselling-is-your-calling

(Photo by KaLisa Veer on Unsplash)

You're the person people call when something goes wrong. You always have been.

Friends ring you when their relationship falls apart. Colleagues seek you out when they're struggling. You're the one people trust with the things that actually matter.

You listen in a way most people don't. You're genuinely curious about people. Not in a nosy way. In an attentive, caring way.

And you've probably spent years asking yourself: how do I actually do something useful with this? How do I make a genuine difference, not from a distance, not in the abstract, but directly, with another person?

A lot of people who find their way to counselling training arrive with exactly that question. They didn't know training was an option. They just knew they wanted to help in a way that actually meant something.

No psychology degree required. No prior experience. No typical student profile. People arrive at this work from all stages of life, all kinds of backgrounds.

If this sounds like you, or someone you know, it might be worth a conversation.



(Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash)

Someone cancelled their interview with us recently.

Her reason? She had been told by another provider that counselling training only wants young people. She was turning 70.

She was wrong. And so were they.

There is no upper age limit for counselling training in the UK. It is not in the CPCAB specification. It is not in the BACP ethical framework. It exists nowhere in the structure of the qualification pathway.

What counselling training actually looks for is the capacity to sit with another person's experience without flinching. The ability to reflect on yourself honestly. The desire to be genuinely useful to someone in difficulty.

None of that belongs to the young.

In many cases, life experience deepens it. The losses you have lived through. The relationships you have navigated. The moments where you have had to hold difficulty without resolution. These are not irrelevant to this work. They are the foundation of it.

If you have been wondering whether you are too old to start, you are not. The question worth asking is whether this is the right work for you, not whether the right time has passed.

(Photo credit: gaspar zaldo on Unsplash)

You're sitting with someone whose world feels completely foreign to you. Different culture. Different class. Different life experiences.

Your first instinct? Panic.

The belief that you need shared experience to offer real help runs deep in early training. That without familiarity, you have nothing to offer. That your difference from the client is a barrier, maybe even disqualifying.

Here's the reframe: your difference isn't a problem. It's information.

When you try to understand someone by mapping their story onto your own, you start deleting details. The parts that don't fit get smoothed over. You create a version of their experience that makes sense to you, but it's no longer their experience. It's yours.

You're not listening to them anymore. You're listening through your filters.

Difference reveals your assumptions about what's normal. Your privilege. Your blind spots. All of it becomes visible through contrast. That's not comfortable. But it's genuinely useful.

There's also something freeing in saying "I don't know what that's like for you." When the difference is obvious, pretending otherwise undermines trust. Authenticity builds connection. Curiosity builds it further.

You don't need shared experience to help someone. You need presence, humility, and a willingness to sit with not knowing.

Read the full post here:

Working With Difference in Counselling | Not a Problem Your difference from your client isn't a barrier. It's valuable information. Learn how to work across difference in counselling with curiosity and empathy.

You're sitting in a skills practice session. You start with the contract. And then you say: "I work within the ethical framework of the BACP."

Tick. Done. Ethics covered.

Except it isn't done.

At the start of training, ethics often feels like bureaucracy. Something to mention to meet requirements. Rules to memorise so you don't get in trouble.

Most students think: "As long as I say I adhere to the BACP Ethical Framework, I've done ethics."

But that statement on its own means nothing. It's the equivalent of saying "I'm a good person" without demonstrating what that looks like in practice.

Ethics isn't separate from the counselling work. It's inseparable from it.

An ethical framework isn't a list of rules about what you can and can't do. It's the container that holds the work safe. It's about how you are with someone, not just what you say at the beginning of a session.

Ending on time is an ethical act. Confidentiality is ethical respect. Working within your competence is ethical humility.

Every decision you make in the room has an ethical dimension.

Read the full post here:

What Ethics Actually Means in Counselling (Beyond the Rules) Ethics isn't a tick box exercise. It's the container that holds counselling work safe. Learn what working within an ethical framework actually means.

Read the impact our courses have beyond the qualification.

Enrolment is open for September 2026 - choose from daytime or evening; weekday or weekends.

📌 https://www.schoolofcounselling.com/application-form

Most people who start counselling training believe they're already empathic.

They care about people. They feel for others. They relate to what someone is going through.

But here's what that often looks like in practice: you're perceiving someone's emotions through your own experience. Filtering their story through your frame. Waiting for the moment you can say "I know exactly how you feel, that happened to me too."

That's not empathy. That's your own material getting in the way.
Empathy in counselling isn't a technique or a phrase. It isn't "I understand" or "that sounds awful." Those responses, however well-intentioned, often close a conversation down rather than open it up.

Carl Rogers described empathy as entering the private world of the other person as if it were your own, without ever losing the "as if." You track their experience without merging with it. You stay with them, not ahead of them.

The difference between empathy and sympathy is worth sitting with. Sympathy is witnessing someone's pain and pulling away from it slightly. Offering a solution. Changing the subject. Empathy stays in it.

Most students find this harder than they expected. That's the point.

Read the full post here:

What Empathy Really Means in Counselling (Beyond 'I Understand') Learn what empathy really means in counselling from a person-centred perspective. Guidance for CPCAB Level 2 students on Carl Rogers' core conditions.

Most people who start counselling training believe they're already good listeners.

They're kind, attentive, and they care. But therapeutic listening is something different entirely.

Here's what students typically do without realising it.
They listen for the space where they can offer their opinion. The other person becomes almost absent in their perception. They're focused on themselves, their thoughts, the moment they can jump in.

That's social listening. And it's what most of us do, all the time.

Therapeutic listening is something else. It's a collaborative exploration of how the individual is experiencing their world. Not metabolising their story through your own frame. Not formulating a response while they're still speaking.

It means attending to body language, voice tone, what's beneath the content. It means being genuinely present to another person rather than waiting for your turn.

The shift sounds simple. Students find it one of the hardest things they do on the course.

Read the full post here:

What Good Listening Actually Looks Like in Counselling (It's Not What You Think) Discover what therapeutic listening really involves. Practical guidance for CPCAB Level 2 students on developing active listening and responding skills.

Online doesn't need to feel impersonal. Creating an intimate, close, learning environment is about how you show up and hold that space. One reason why we prefer small groups on our courses.

Read more reviews here: https://www.schoolofcounselling.com/student-reviews