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Student UpdateJan 2018 No. 36

A warm welcome back to all of our CPCAB friends at the start of a chilly 2018. We hope you have enjoyed your festive season, however you spent it, and are managing to avoid the many nasty bugs that are circulating this winter. Please stay safe and well!

We're doing well here at CPCAB Towers in spite of some staff illness, but there's a big hole in the team since we said goodbye to our dear Traci Postings last term. Traci joined us in 2006 and has truly made her mark on the organisation with her unique blend of experience, wisdom and an astonishing appetite for hard work. Plus a remarkable sense of humour! She has left us to take on an exciting new role, still in the area of counselling and psychotherapy; it offers her many new challenges which she is eagerly anticipating. Although we miss her dreadfully we won’t lose touch with her completely as she will still be helping us with various projects, including our in-house external assessment filming programme.

Watch out for April's Update when we’ll tell you about the new members of our team, which will include Traci's replacement as Qualification Leader for Levels 2 and 3 as well as other staff to assist us as we go forward to, we hope, a bright future together. Best wishes to you all.

A New Vision for Mental Health

Have you ever wondered what mental healthcare would look like if, knowing what we know today, it was redesigned from scratch?

A New Vision for Mental Health is a new website that seeks to answer this question by taking a critical, informed and constructive look at the current mental health system, the concepts on which it rests and its constituent parts.

It provides a resource for tutors and learners, with new items posted several times each week.

It explores ideas, insights and suggestions – from a wide range of individuals and organisations – that might, in time, lay the foundations for a new and quite different approach to mental healthcare.

Just some of the subjects covered in A New Vision for Mental Health:

The vision includes five broad themes for discussion:

  • Emotion-focused care
  • Collaborative practice
  • A coherent system for mental/emotional health
  • Development of a wellbeing society
  • A balanced health budget

To find out more – and to get involved – please visit www.newvisionformentalhealth.com. Access is completely free and open to everyone.

Practise External Assessment films

Over the next few months we will be making available our back catalogue of External Assessment films. We will be publishing films that are no longer used as exam materials for the Level 2 Certificate in Counselling Skills or the Level 3 Certificate in Counselling Studies.

We recently released the first film from this selection, 'Smokescreen', which is available on Youtube and the CPCAB website. Please feel free to share it as it could provide a useful learning resource.

Keep an eye on our Youtube channel as we'll be releasing more of these films regularly over the coming weeks.

CPCAB Counselling Research Award 2017

The CPCAB Counselling Research Award aims to highlight significant research, document it on video, and disseminate it online. It is awarded annually at the BACP research conference before being made into a film by the Counselling Channel.

The most recent Award went to University of Sussex doctoral student Tracey Fuller. Her project The Trust is the Work looks at how to gain the cooperation of young people who are undergoing counselling at school. It was conducted in several school projects run by Place2Be, the UK’s largest provider of school counselling services.

The film of Tracey's research has just been completed and you can watch a taster below.

The full film can be found on the CPCAB Counselling Research Award website.

Social Media

This is just to say that we now have just over 14,000 'YouTweetFacers' (having added 1,000 in the last four months). This is a combination of:

How to Build a Student Portfolio

In our latest “how to” video we look at building a student portfolio. Heather, our Senior Counselling Professional, shows step-by-step what should be put in a portfolio and how content should be labelled and presented. We hope the video will be useful to tutors and students alike so please share it widely.

We are working on more videos like this so if you think of a similar subject that would benefit from a “how to” video please get in touch with our Video Production Manager, Steve Spraggon.

Humour

Our thanks go to Rupert Fawcett of the hilarious “Off the leash” site for his kind permission to use this drawing.