Counselling and Psychotherapy at Chester Undergraduate, to Postgraduate and Beyond

The University of Chester locates Counselling and Psychotherapy degrees in Social and Political Sciences. We position Counselling and Psychotherapy in its political context and recgnise the importance of social justice, studying here will encourage you to be a practitioner that can examine the world from a holistic and inclusive standpoint.

“Students who train in counselling and psychotherapy in a university such as Chester encounter, routinely, material that clinical training alone can tend to ignore or marginalise. Exposure to the social and political sciences as a close neighbour teaches students that many of the people they will eventually sit with have moved through systems that compounded their suffering rather than addressed it, and that working with those people requires understanding those systems, not just their presenting distress. Proximity to these subjects and their influence gives them a working literacy around class, race, gender, and the way structural conditions shape individual lives long before any therapeutic encounter begins.

None of this produces counsellors or psychotherapists who can theorise beautifully but struggle in the room. The reflective practice traditions that are now well established in therapeutic training consistently show that the capacity to think critically about what one is doing tends to produce better practice, not more limited practice. What this context produces, we think, are practitioners who carry a kind of structural awareness that purely clinical training might rarely achieve. The recognition and understanding that a person's distress can be simultaneously real and also a rational response to genuinely difficult circumstances is one of the most therapeutic things available, and it doesn't come automatically from clinical competence alone.” Dr Paul Taylor, Head of Humanities and Social Sciences School, University of Chester.

Read more at Chester’s political home of Counselling and Psychotherapy courses.

Each of our courses emphasise that understanding and knowledge is best achieved by experiencing the world from an informed, active, and professional perspective. Our local connections, placements, and assessments are rooted in what is real, encouraging you to analyse the world from a place of empathy and academic understanding.

During module SO5992 – Experiential Learning: Social Impact Leadership in Action, our students have been working closely with local crisis café, Café 71. Our students have been working in collaboration with this organisation on a social action project titled “A creative exploration of the lived experiences of individuals in a wellbeing recovery project.” Our students set up a creative workshop where service users at the café could share their lived experiences of their mental health recovery. Students developed their skills in research methods, by creating the workshop, interviewing the service users, and then creating poems based on these interviews, in order to present these at an exhibition at the crisis café. Our students also received training in self-harm awareness from Café 71 and training in listening skills from the Samaritans, during this module.

Our staff are thought leaders and are engaged in the pursuit of contributing to the improvement of academic and wider communities. We build in projects and experiences across all of our courses to equip students with the mindset to practically enhance the world through your professional and academic pursuits.   

We also host a lecture series focusing on inclusive approaches to counselling delivered by a range of experts in the field. The topics included counselling in relation to race, disability, neurodiversity, gender identity, sexuality, faith and spirituality, cultural attunement, privilege and power. Last years guest speakers included renowned author, Dr Dwight Turner, founder of the Muslim Therapy Network, Myria Khan, Sex and Relationship Therapist, Rhi Kemp-Davies, Megan Lewis, an alumnus of the MA Clinical Counselling who presented on working with neurodiverse clients, and Brigitte Stephenson, a trauma informed counsellor who works with Spokz People who aim to enable more disabled people and their family members to access disability-affirming psychological support.