MSc Counselling

Our MSc in Counselling at Bangor University aims to prepare you to take an active role as a member of the professional counselling/psychotherapy community. This course explores a range of psychological approaches and therapeutic methods to provide holistic training in adult counselling. You will learn about the Humanistic approach and Person-Centred therapy, Psychodynamic approach and Psychoanalytic therapy, Behavioural approach and Behaviour therapy, and Cognitive approach and Cognitive therapy. In addition, you will be introduced to several integrative approaches (for example, we might explore Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, or Transactional Analysis). 
This Counselling Masters can be taken as a full-time two-year course or a part-time four-year course and there is more information on how that works in practice in the Course Content tab.   You will also take part in practical activities to develop your communication skills and integrate therapeutic techniques into your practice. You will engage in regular observed counselling skills sessions with your peers and this will prepare you for undertaking a placement of 100hrs of supervised counselling. Our skills lecturers and placement coordinator have an extensive counselling background working with clients in the NHS, and they will support you in developing your counselling skills and applying them in practice on placement. Our previous students have completed these placements with organisations such as the NHS Primary Mental Health Service, bereavement service CRUSE, Age UK, the Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Service, etc.   Our course also has a strong academic core and we are proud of the way that we integrate Psychology and Research training throughout the course to ensure that our graduates are fully rounded practitioners. Our modules draw on the expertise of a range of practitioners in addition to counsellors - including clinical psychologists and researchers – to provide comprehensive training in mental health. Evidence-based practice is becoming increasingly in demand within this sector and we prepare our students for a career which may require them to draw on research skills and psychological knowledge, alongside applied counselling skills.    The extensive curriculum covered on our programme will equip you to work with clients across various settings, and provide you with a toolkit of evidence-based techniques and relationship-focused methods. This training programme is designed to provide you with an opportunity to graduate with all of the skills needed to apply for doctorate level study or work in an empirically-based practice.  
If you complete the MSc in Counselling with the counselling placement, then you will meet all of the requirements to apply for registered counsellor status with the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society (NCPS) and/or the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). Both of these professional bodies are accredited by the Professional Standards Authority under its Accredited Registers for Health and Social Care. Our course meets all of the requirements for you to become a student member of the NCPS and/or BACP while studying. After graduating from our course, you can then apply to become an Accredited Registrant with the NCPS and/or Individual Member of the BACP (moving to Registered Member after passing their online Certificate of Proficiency test). Membership of either of these professional bodies will place you in a strong position to apply for jobs in counselling or begin working towards establishing your own private practice.   This course is led by Prof Fay Short, who is a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society and a registered member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. She is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and her teaching excellence has been recognised in a highly prestigious National Teaching Fellowship award. In her therapeutic work, she is an accredited hypnotherapist, NLP practitioner, Executive Coach and Mentor, and advanced practitioner of REBT, alongside her core training in counselling. Her dual role of counsellor and psychologist also enabled her to produce her textbook, Core Approaches in Counselling and Psychotherapy, which seeks to explain client work from both a therapeutic and psychological perspective. Prof Short draws on her extensive experience in academia and her practical work in the field to provide students on our MSc in Counselling with an in-depth insight into the theory and practice of modern counselling techniques.