Working with Difference & Diversity

We place an especial emphasis on Working with Difference and Diversity (WDD) and have a long-term commitment towards helping to create a diverse (multi-cultural) and community-based profession - fostering an approach through which practitioners return, post-training, to work in the community in which they are based. In this vein we seek to extend tutor (and trainee) awareness of issues relating to WDD, such as those concerning cultural and class backgrounds, age, colour, gender, sexual orientation and disabilities.

Working with Difference and Diversity is an integral part of all:

• CPCAB qualifications (WDD is one of the seven processes that form a key element of the CPCAB model of practitioner development and proficiency that underpins all of our qualifications).
• CPCAB External Verifier training and verification procedures (for example, our External Verifiers are instructed to look for evidence in trainees' journals that a willingness to explore and understand WDD is transferred into their everyday lives and work).

CPCAB has produced a comprehensive guide for tutors (available on request) concerning the integration of WDD Centre programmes and the implementation of such programmes.

CPCAB also:

• Validates a large number of ethnic “majority” training courses (some involving a 100% ethnic “majority”). As a result, CPCAB has become one of Europe's leading awarding bodies for the training of Black and Asian counsellors.
• Validates what has now become the UK's first independently certificated Islamic Counselling Course (in the London borough of Brent) - a course that has received a glowing report from Her Majesty's Inspectors. The popularity of the course is such that participants have come from as far away as Bradford. As far as is known, CPCAB is currently the only UK Awarding Body to validate Islamic counsellor training programmes.