In my role as Accreditation Lead at BACP, I spend a great deal of time thinking about standards: how they are written, how they are applied and how they shape training environments. I also spend time listening to students. Increasingly, what students are telling us has been difficult to ignore.

Familiar concerns, still unresolved

For decades, counselling and psychotherapy have spoken about anti-oppressive, inclusive and culturally informed practice. These ideas are not new. They run through our ethical frameworks, our teaching and our professional language. And yet, when we look at the literature and when we listen directly to students, the same concerns keep being raised. Experiences of marginalisation, prejudice and inequality continue to be reported within training.

That raises an uncomfortable question: why are we still here?

What students are telling us

Students training on BACP accredited courses have described experiences such as feeling silenced in learning spaces, encountering assumptions about their identities, or lacking confidence that concerns about discrimination will be taken seriously. These experiences cut across race, disability, sexuality, religion, class, age and other stigmatised identities.

Why this matters for accreditation

From an accreditation perspective, this matters deeply. Training environments are not neutral. They are places where future practitioners learn not only theory and skills, but how power operates in relationships. If students experience harm, dismissal or exclusion during training, that has implications for the profession as a whole.

What is different this time?

One of the provocations that has shaped this work, articulated powerfully by Professor Divine Charura, is that we have been talking about anti-oppressive practice for a very long time, yet meaningful change has been slow. Continuing to do the same things and expecting different outcomes is no longer defensible.

What feels different about this work is its starting point. Rather than asking whether principles are present in curricula, it centres lived experience across training, placement, supervision and personal therapy. It explores not only whether harm occurs, but whether it is recognised, held and repaired.

Importantly, this work has been shaped with students and lived experience contributors. This is not a top-down exercise. It is an invitation to speak openly and honestly at a moment when the profession is arguably at an inflection point. We can no longer say we did not know.

What I hope will come from this

I write this as a white, cisgender, middle-aged, middle-class woman working within an institutional role. I do not experience the profession in the same way as many of the students whose voices we are seeking to hear. That makes listening carefully and with humility essential.

My hope is that the findings from this research will give us an evidence base we cannot look away from. For accreditation, this means being better equipped to reflect on where standards are supporting ethical, psychologically safe learning environments and where they are not.

More broadly, I hope this work supports systemic change rather than apportioning individual blame and helps us move beyond reassurance towards accountability.

Asking who is served and who is harmed

Accreditation should not only ask whether criteria are met.

It should also ask who is being served and who is being harmed by the systems we uphold. Listening to student voices is one way we begin to answer that question more honestly.

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