Counselling Supervision: The British context

Abstract

Abstract Counselling/psychotherapy supervision is on the verge of a professional breakthrough in Britain today. Training courses are emerging, accreditation for supervisors is in progress and a Code of Ethics for Supervisors is finalised. Yet supervision is still little understood. There are few agreed definitions and certainly no agreed tasks, roles, or even goals of supervision. Conflict still abounds about whether it is more akin to therapy than to education, about whether or not it shold be evaluative, and about what areas of counselling it should cover. Supervisors are poorly trained in supervision and areas such as the legal implications and responsibilities of supervision not clear and often not even considered important. What research has been done is confined largely to United States and few attempts have been made to apply findings to Britain, e.g. how valid in Britain is the current research on Developmental Models of supervision which outline the stages through which counsellors in training tr...