How person-centred counselling trainers understand and experience their role in the current British context

Abstract

This article reports the findings of a qualitative study into the experience of personcentred training from the viewpoint of the trainer. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was the adopted approach. The researcher conducted a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with five person-centred trainers with experience across a range of settings. The findings demonstrate the commitment of person-centred trainers to a relational approach with the facilitation of individual potential at its heart. The intrinsically rewarding nature of the role is highlighted alongside its substantial demands. Participants demonstrated a primary identification with themselves as counsellor trainers rather than academics and some lack of reconciliation with current developments within counselling. IntroductionThis study formed part of a larger study into how trainers from a range of theoretical orientations understood and experienced their work in settings across Britain. The wider study had been stimulated by my involvement in the training of counsellors in a range of roles and within a variety of settings in Great Britain over nearly two decades. My experience is one of trainers operating within an increasingly pressurised context. Challenges have included: changes to professional course accreditation criteria; the need to prepare trainees for a world increasingly calling for brief interventions based on evidence-based practice; and students struggling with restricted employment opportunities on the back of public spending cuts, economic recession and competition for work from other occupational groups (e.g. Improving Access to Psychological Therapies [IAPT] trained practitioners within the health service). In parallel, funding cuts and cultural shifts within the British educational sector have led to small, relatively high-cost and low-profit programmes such as counselling becoming less attractive to institutions and therefore more vulnerable to cuts and closures.