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Oliver, James Robert (2024) The social construction of professional counselling practice in UK embedded higher education counselling services: a Foucauldian discourse analysis of practitioner perspectives. Doctoral thesis, London Metropolitan University.
Most UK universities provide Embedded Higher Education Counselling Services (EHECS) as part of their student support offer. However, a wealth of theory based clinical literature belies a long-standing deficiency of empirical research within the UK student counselling sector. Recent research attention concerned with standardised outcome measurement, while important in justifying the value of such counselling services, may nevertheless fail to clarify unique aspects of practice in this context. A social constructionist research framework is advanced to elucidate how counselling practitioners construct the role and functions of their work in EHECS. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with six student counsellors working across UK universities and the transcripts were analysed using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA). The study identified four dominant discourses: Academic achievement, Life-stage, Mental-health crisis and Professional counselling practice which were seen to influence the counsellor role as they manifested through a series of sub-discourses including, the Precedence of educational attainment sub-discourse, the Loco-parentis sub-discourse and the Risk-vulnerability sub-discourse. Student counselling was broadly constructed as a highly flexible, time-limited psycho-social intervention aiming to facilitate academic engagement while concurrently attending to the perceived developmental needs of student-clients. This may contrast with the expectations of students as well as other institutional stakeholders with implications for practice, supervision and training.
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