Ongoing anger and professional reflection

Six years ago, when I was a course leader at an institute in London training counsellors and psychotherapists, after the murder of George Floyd, teaching on lockdown via Zoom, I was angry. Now, working at the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) in the Professional Standards team, I’m still angry.

Questions about embedding anti-oppressive practice 

Sometimes we get requests from course tutors asking us how to embed anti-oppressive practice in the curriculum, how to provide reasonable adjustments, and how to decolonise theory. Whenever we get asked questions like this, I imagine what harm might be happening to students in that cohort, what it might feel like to be unseen, excluded, or made to feel like an afterthought in your own training. 

No simple solutions to systemic oppression in training 

There’s no one easy answer to the question of how to make counsellor and psychotherapist training less oppressive, unjust, and harmful to minoritised students. It’s also not a question that can be devolved to someone outside the course. It’s the work of everyone involved in the learning community to make a commitment to identify all the ways, both personal and structural, that social oppression plays out, and to find creative ways to do better. It’s not a quick fix. 

Responsibility and the limits of institutional reliance 

We know that some courses, some trainers, and some institutions are trying hard to wrangle with the problem of oppressive teaching and learning practices. Those trainers and organisations find, if they look for it, a wealth of information and resources on how to avoid excluding, discriminating, and being irrelevant to minoritised people. But when tutors turn to BACP first, and not to the literature, the many wonderful writers on the topic, and the wealth of training resources available, I worry that they know where to look, but don’t see it as their job to look. 

Collective responsibility within the profession 

For BACP, the work of anti-oppressive practice, such as is articulated in the Race is Complicated Toolkit, is everyone’s work. This is only possible if we all take responsibility as a profession and as individuals for ensuring that students of colour, disabled students, trans, non-binary and gender-questioning students, students affected by poverty and caring responsibilities, and the many other ways that students are harmed in society, don’t experience further harm while in training. 

Listening to students and future hopes for change 

We need to hear from students, to know how far such harm extends, and where there are examples of good practice, as we know there must be. My hope is that, a further six years down the line from my time of writing in 2026, I will be able to say that all BACP accredited courses know how to create safer learning spaces, provide good reasonable adjustments, and offer a diverse and varied curriculum that speaks to the cultures and lived experiences of everyone in training, and the clients that they see. That might seem a wild and naive aspiration, but what motivates me is the hope that if I come back to update this blog in six years' time, I will finally feel more hopeful than angry.

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