Advancing your counselling practice
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If you’re already engaged in counselling practice, this module will support your progress toward achieving SCoPEd framework Column B competencies. You’ll develop advanced knowledge and skills to work more effectively, ethically, and safely with a broader range of clients. Throughout the module, you&/courses/qualifications/details/d230/39;ll enhance your ability to engage with a diverse clientele by learning to recognise and work effectively across cultural and social differences. Additionally, you can tailor your studies to suit your needs, with options like online counselling or working with couples, while assessments based on your client work ensure the learning directly contributes to your professional growth.
What you will study
You will develop SCoPEd framework Column B competencies in the following areas:
Counselling Assessment
You’ll build your own context-relevant, consistent, and theoretically coherent assessment strategy. This includes critically considering what needs to be assessed and how to develop a comprehensive risk-assessment approach. You’ll also learn about audit and evaluation tools and explore their potential role in supporting and developing your practice.
Reflexivity
You’ll develop advanced reflexivity skills that strengthen your resilience when doing emotionally demanding work. The module will help you build deeper self-awareness and understanding of others by teaching you to work effectively with both your own and your client’s unconscious processes. You’ll also evaluate your current supervision arrangements and learn strategies to improve how supervision supports your practice. Throughout the module, you’ll examine how your personal identity, culture, values, and worldview influence your understanding of and responses to clients, particularly when working with clients from different cultural backgrounds, social contexts, or with different lived experiences than your own.
Skills and Knowledge
You’ll enhance your counselling practice through advanced competencies, including formulation skills for complex client presentations, an effective adaptation of your approach to meet individual clients’ needs, and critical appraisal of the theories that underpin your work with clients.
This module also focuses on two important areas in the SCoPEd framework:
Diversity
Diversity is central to your learning journey, reflecting a core concern in contemporary counselling about fostering counselling approaches that ‘work’ for all clients. You’ll explore how social contexts and, in particular, experiences of discrimination and oppression create mental distress. You’ll consider critiques of established counselling theories and learn how to effectively explore differences between you and your client and how to adapt your practice to meet their needs.
Counselling Research
You’ll learn how to draw on research as an important resource in your practice. The module content is explicitly research-informed, and the value of counselling research to evaluate counselling theories and practices is consistently – but not uncritically – explored. To support your ability to understand and evaluate counselling research, you’ll learn about the main approaches to conducting counselling research.
To complete the module, you can personalise your learning to meet your professional needs and interests. You’ll make two choices: first, between studying online counselling or learning how to use CPD effectively for professional development; and second, between developing skills for working with couples or working with complex loss.
Professional recognition
This module requires you to complete a minimum of 25 supervised client hours as part of our BSc (Honours) Counselling, which offers training to meet the SCoPEd framework Column A- and B-competences.
Entry requirements
Before you can register for this module, you will need to confirm that you:
- are working with clients in a suitable counselling practice/placement
- can guarantee a minimum of 25 client hours with individuals aged 16 and older whilst studying this module – this can be in-person or a mix of in-person and online
- have an appropriate supervisor for your work in this setting – your supervisor must have the necessary knowledge and skills for supervising students who are developing Column B competences
- will receive appropriate supervision (e.g. 90 minutes of individual supervision per calendar month)
- have relevant practice/indemnity insurance.
Please download and complete this agreement form by 11 September 2025. You will also need to register by as online registration is not possible for this module.
Requirements for the duration of the module
You are required to clear a criminal background check as a pre-entry condition for the BSc (Honours) Counselling. If you are investigated for criminal acts after this, you must inform us so that a decision can be made about the appropriateness of your ongoing enrolment.
You are also required to:
- be in counselling practice in an appropriate setting
- have appropriate (e.g. required frequency) supervision with an appropriate supervisor for your module-required counselling practice (minimum of 25 counselling hours). In addition, your supervisor must agree to complete a supervisor report and authorise logs of your counselling work
- maintain membership in an appropriate counselling professional body
- maintain relevant practice/indemnity insurance
- follow module guidance on how to protect and ensure the confidentiality and security of information about your counselling clients in all verbal and written communications during their training
- follow university and module guidance on appropriate communication with and self-disclosure to peers.
For more information about your placement, required practice hours, and supervisor and supervision requirements for this module, please see the .
Preparatory work
In preparation for this module, it would be useful for you to:
- consider what options you might be interested in taking
- identify any employment aspirations, for example, working in a specific counselling sector
- do an inventory of how you work with clients and describe how you work to gain prospective clients. Following this, refresh your understanding of the key theories, concepts and techniques that underpin how you currently work with clients.
What's included
You&/courses/qualifications/details/d230/39;ll be provided with the module textbook Counselling Skills and Knowledge for SCoPEd B: Diversity, Self-awareness, Assessment and Research and have access to the module website, which includes:
- a week-by-week study planner
- audio-visual materials, including excerpts of counselling interactions and podcasts with experts
- interactive elements such as multiple-choice quizzes, word clouds and polls
- learning reflexive journal
- assessment guide
- online tutorials and forums.
Computing requirements
- Primary device – A desktop or laptop computer. It’s possible to access some materials on a mobile phone, tablet or Chromebook; however, they will not be suitable as your primary device.
- Peripheral device – Headphones/earphones with a built-in microphone for online tutorials.
- Our OU Study app operates on supported versions of Android and iOS.
- Operating systems – Windows 11 or latest supported macOS. Microsoft will no longer support Windows 10 as of 14 October 2025.
- Internet access – Broadband or mobile connection.
- Browser – Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are recommended; Mozilla Firefox and Safari may be suitable.
- Software – You will need to use free specialist software to edit an audio recording.