Abstract

This report is about research carried out with sixty-two tutors who have worked on the Certificate in Counselling Skills at the Department of Adult and Community Education, NUI Maynooth. This course is a foundation-level course, conducted at NUI Maynooth and at outreach centres throughout the Republic of Ireland, and it has attracted over 14,000 students since it began in 1984. It has developed within a context where the profession of counselling has emerged as separate from psychology, and in a social context of a growing awareness of the role of counseling. The course is also unique in the field of counseling education, in that it has adopted from the start an educational stance rather than a therapeutic one. All the course tutors are qualified and, for the most part, practising counsellors. Many who were core to the course in its early days were also heavily involved in establishing the Irish Association for Counselling and Therapy (IACT), now the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (IACP).