BSc (Hons) Counselling

Counselling and psychotherapy are valuable and effective forms of treatment for a wide variety of problems in living, from everyday concerns about work or relationships to more serious mental health issues like chronic anxiety and depression. There has been a significant growth in counselling over the last decades which is only likely to increase given that the demand for counselling services continues to rise in the UK. Counselling has moved from a largely voluntary activity into a profession with practitioners employed in primary care, industry, local authorities and many other workplaces.

In recent years there have been increased efforts to further professionalise the Counselling and Psychotherapy field, and to assure and monitor quality standards in counselling training and practice. This has culminated in the publication of a shared framework for the ‘Scope of Practice and Education for counselling and psychotherapy’ (SCoPEd Framework) in January 2022, developed by a partnership group including the leading professional bodies in counselling and psychotherapy in the UK (representing collectively over 75,000 counsellors and psychotherapists).

At The Open University, we have responded to these developments by producing a new counselling training course - R86 BSc (Hons) Counselling. This qualification offers both a full training pathway for students who want to become a counsellor, and an opportunity for current practitioners to acquire new advanced counsellor competencies as part of an undergraduate degree. Developed in consultation with accredited awarding bodies, the degree has been designed to allow graduates to significantly advance your practice competencies according to the SCoPEd framework which sets out minimum core training, practice, and competence requirements for counsellors.

The new counselling qualification allows you to study flexibly, choose practice competencies that suit you and ‘bring in’ client and supervision hours that you have which are conducted in external practice settings (e.g., agency settings, placement, private practice).  

• If you are not a practitioner yet, you will need to complete sufficient external counselling training first before you can enrol on the R86 BSc (Hons) Counselling (see studying R86 as full counselling training pathway).
• If you are already a qualified practitioner (at SCoPEd framework ‘Therapist A’ level) you can top-up your counselling skills and competencies by studying year 2 and 3 of the qualification ('top-up' pathway, see studying R86 as top-up for SCoPEd-A practitioners).

Whether you’re just beginning your counselling career or are a current practitioner, by the time of graduating from R86 you will acquire new counsellor SCoPEd B competencies as part of an undergraduate degree.