School Counsellor

Job description

Job responsibilities

To exercise professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of clients who self-refer or are referred by families/carers, school staff, GPs and other appropriate health and social care professionals.

To assess clients presenting with complex personal difficulties including those arising from mild to moderate mental health difficulties, based on accurate understanding and utilising a conceptual framework of the clients difficulties.

To make decisions regarding suitability for counselling, with particular regard to issues of risk, and referral onward to other specialist services, using trauma informed therapeutic decisions.

To formulate and implement counselling and treatment plans with clients, normally within a brief structured time frame or a contracted number of sessions.

To exercise sound theoretical knowledge of the processes of counselling and based on evidence of efficacy, to employ a range of short-term counselling interventions to meet the needs of the referred client.

To be able to work with a range of client presentations, including ambivalence and resistance, in order to facilitate clients ability to explore a range of life issues which are frequently of a distressing emotional nature.

To provide regular information to referrers, about the treatment process and outcome, initial and ongoing risk assessments, making appropriate disclosure and referral onward where necessary.

To communicate and liaise where appropriate with all other professionals involved in the individual clients treatment and ongoing emotional wellbeing and mental health care.

To provide such information reports as are required in order to facilitate effective communication with referring agencies and commissioners.

Teaching, Training and Supervision

To contribute to the supervisory needs of the team as required, including where appropriate, supervision of newly qualified counsellors (Band 5), and other staff.

To contribute to mentoring of trainee counsellors and assisting the team leaders in monitoring of appropriate caseloads for trainee practitioners.

To contribute to in-service training events through presentation with information relating to good working practice, special project and procedural changes.

To maintain the highest professional standards of practice by undertaking regular external professional supervision, internal peer supervision and appraisal.

Professional, Management, Recruitment, Policy and Service Development

To be involved as appropriate in the short listing and interviewing of new staff.

To contribute to the induction and orientation process of new staff.

To contribute to the development, implementation and monitoring of the teams operations policies.

Research and Service Evaluation

To undertake appropriate research, project management audit and service evaluation with colleagues within the service to help to develop service provision.

IT Responsibilities (other than those for research)

To provide electronic clinical activity data

To provide appropriate statistical returns as required.

General

To manage own clinical caseload within guidelines provided by the teams operational management and the professional guidelines and ethical framework of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.

To maintain the highest standards of clinical record keeping including electronic data entry and recording, report writing and responsible exercise of professional self-governance. To comply with the Trust information governance and record keeping policies and guidelines.

To continue to develop the skills of a reflexive practitioner by conducting regular personal audit and evaluation of clinical work and by maintaining an active engagement with current development in the field of counselling and related disciplines.

To have basic keyboard skills and be able to use Microsoft office applications such as Word and Excel.

To maintain an up-to-date knowledge of legislation, national and local policies and issues in relation to both a specific group and primary care adult mental health services.

KEY WORKING RELATIONSHIPS:

Internal

• Head of Integrated Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing
• YoutherapY Team
• Administration Team
• CAMHS Staff
• CASHER Staff
• MHST Staff
• Families and Integrated Community Care Division staff

External

• Local Authority
• Clinical Commissioning Groups
• Schools
• GPs
• Other healthcare and non-healthcare organisations

Person Specification

Qualifications

Essential

• Diploma level qualification in counselling from a BACP accredited course or equivalent.
• Current BACP accreditation.

Desirable

• Qualification in clinical supervision

Knowledge

Essential

• Substantial post qualification clinical work with children and young people, including working within the educational sector.
• Experience of short-term time-limited work.
• Evidence of regular supervised practice.
• Evidence of CPD meeting minimum requirements for continued accreditation with BACP.
• Experience of working with a diverse client group with a wide range of presenting problems and significant level of distress

Desirable

• Experience of mentoring trainee counsellors.
• Experience of collaborative counselling work in the NHS.

Skills

Essential

• Highly developed interpersonal skills and communication skills, both oral and written.
• Evidence of ability to organise own workload.
• Basic keyboard skills.
• Ability to sustain intense levels of concentration responding and participating as required.
• Ability to self-reflect and use clinical supervision appropriately.
• Ability to cope and deal with highly distressing emotional circumstances.
• Ability to cope with difficult working conditions.
• Ability to identify and employ mechanisms of clinical governance as appropriate, to support and maintain clinical practice in the face of regular exposure to highly emotive material and challenging behaviour.
• Car driver and/or ability and willingness to travel to locations throughout the organisation.

Desirable

• Extensive clinical and theoretical knowledge of more than one model of counselling.
• Understanding of the role of mentoring.
• Specialist skills, e.g. trauma-informed work, psychosexual counselling, working with ethnic minorities.
• Experience of audit evaluation and outcome measurement.
• Experience of working with a diverse client group

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.

Certificate of Sponsorship

Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the UK Visas and Immigration website (Opens in a new tab).

From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. Guidance can be found here Criminal records checks for overseas applicants (Opens in a new tab).

UK Registration

Applicants must have current UK professional registration. For further information please see NHS Careers website (opens in a new window).

Employer details

Employer name

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Address

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals

26 Talbot Road

Blackpool

FY11LF

Employer's website

https://www.bfwh.nhs.uk/ (Opens in a new tab)