Counsellors & Psychotherapists Registration Board

The Counsellors and Psychotherapists Registration Board has taken the decision to publish all the submissions received as part of a public stakeholder consultation process – undertaken in late 2023 – on its draft Standards of Proficiency and Criteria for Education and Training Programmes for both professions.

Responses have been collated into three documents:

Document One:Online Questionnaire Responses received specific to the draft Standards and Criteria for Counsellors
Document Two: Online Questionnaire Responses received specific to the draft Standards and Criteria for Psychotherapists
Document Three: All email and hard copy submissions received related to both Counsellors and Psychotherapists. This includes email or hard copy written responses that were specific to one profession or applied to both professions

The Board’s aim in publishing the responses it received is to provide all stakeholders with the opportunity to review the breadth of feedback received from across the counselling and psychotherapy professions and examine the multiplicity of opinions – oftentimes divergent perspectives – that were presented to the Board through the consultation process.

In order to ensure the anonymity of all respondents, and in line with its obligations under GDPR legislation, the Board has removed any identifiable information from each submission. It is for this reason that certain words or sentences have been redacted. In instances where larger paragraphs of text have been redacted, this reflects instances where an organisation has provided lengthy contextual background information around its work and would be identifiable on the basis of this.

The only information that is not redacted relates to:

Names of organisations that identified their wish to be publicly named as a respondent in the Board’s Public Consultation Reports;
Names of professional bodies that respondents identified membership of, as this was not deemed to be information that would allow for the identification of any one individual; and
All substantive feedback submitted as part of a consultation response.

The Board has also published detailed consultation reports, outlining the rationales for all the decisions taken in drafting and setting its Standards of Proficiency and Criteria for Education and Training Programmes for both counsellors and psychotherapists.