BSc (Hons) Counselling Psychology with Integrated Foundation Year

Foundation in Knowledge and Skills

This module utilises your personal experience as a basis for enhancing skills and knowledge relevant to academic, professional, and personal development.

The module will support and encourage you to engage with higher education by developing academic skills and building confidence in their practical application.  It is designed to enhance employability and efficacy within the workplace.

The module aims to build resilience, communication skills, self-confidence and reflective ability.

Being and Feeling

This module provides an integrated introductory approach to the areas of being and feeling. The module will provide an introduction to the historical foundations of being and feeling, as well as important associated findings.

Prominent schools of thought about how the mind should be conceived and studied will be explored.  The areas of introspection, behaviourism, and Gestalt psychology will be explored.

Thinking and Developing

This module aims to provide you with an integrated introductory approach to the areas of thinking and developing. The module will provide you with an in-depth understanding of development, cognition, and evolution.

Project

This module includes a combination of teamwork and independent study. Within this module, there will be an opportunity to foster innovation and cooperation that will be crucial for your transition into degree studies. Peer support and supervision will enable you to conduct and report your learning, demonstrating strong academic skills.

The module will enable you to focus on an area of interest that is associated with your future specialisation or past experience. Students will be supported to implement an analytic approach to present a project on their area of interest.

Social Minds: Exploring Human Interaction

The module will explore the experience of relationships through the processes related to forming an impression of people, feeling attracted or not to them, wanting to be their friend, getting to know them and forming a relationship with them, through a variety of behaviours, such as approaching them, talking to them, and meeting them socially.

Psychological theories and empirical findings from investigations into impression formation will be introduced, and methodology will be explored.

Thinking Like a Social Scientist: Study and Research Skills

This module introduces research design skills essential for success and growth throughout your degree.

It provides you with guidance on the basics of data analysis using JASP software and covers key concepts in time management and teamwork.

Critical thinking skills are developed to enhance the ability to present convincing arguments and evidence in written work. Academic reading skills are also supported to enable access to complex scientific reports.

Additionally, the module offers instruction on producing high-quality assessments, including creating references and citations using APA style, presenting information effectively, and writing well-structured essays.

Reflection on strengths and weaknesses is encouraged to facilitate continuous improvement and progress toward academic goals.

Core Skills and Ethics in Counselling Psychology

This module introduces you to fundamental counselling psychology skills and ethical considerations, integrating theoretical knowledge, skills development, and applied practice.

You will explore the philosophical and theoretical roots of counselling psychology with a Humanistic emphasis, while also engaging with psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioural perspectives to understand their role in different therapeutic contexts.

Throughout the module, you will engage with ethical frameworks (e.g., BPS, HCPC), learning about professional responsibilities such as confidentiality, boundaries, and ethical decision-making.

You will also develop core counselling skills such as active listening, empathy, and open questioning, with an emphasis on your application in professional contexts. Learning activities will include structured skills practice, observation of counselling demonstrations, guided self-reflection, and peer feedback. Through these experiences, you will build confidence in therapeutic interactions while critically reflecting on your own development and emerging professional identity.

Facilitating Wellbeing: Positive Perspectives

Based on the discipline of Positive Psychology, the module will explore the experience of living well, relating the need to understand well-being, emotions, motivation, aspirations and goals to self-development, personality traits, needs for achievement, self-efficacy, and self-esteem, environmental influences and the enhancement of well-being.

Psychological theories and empirical findings from investigations into needs, motivation and traits will be introduced, as will the use of selected nonparametric statistics.

This module aims to give you an understanding of a broad area of everyday functioning and experience in terms of the behaviours, feelings, attitudes, and mental processes involved in that experience.

The module also aims to use functional analysis so that a broad experience can be broken down into a series of questions concerning the sub-functions and behaviours involved, allowing the psychological constructs and theories that are associated with those behaviours to be elucidated and explored.  Exploration will involve appropriate methods to investigate what psychological constructs and theories relate to relevant behaviours and function.

The module will explore the experience of positive psychology relating the need to understand one’s own motivation, aspirations, and goals to self-development, personality, need for achievement, self-efficacy and self-esteem.

Psychological theories and empirical findings from investigations into emotions, traits and environments will be introduced and non-parametric methodology will be explored.

Mind and Machine

The module aims to develop an understanding of a broad area of everyday functioning and experience in terms of the behaviours, feelings, attitudes and mental processes involved in that experience.

You will use functional analysis so that a broad experience can be broken down into a series of questions concerning the sub-functions, psychological states and behaviours involved, allowing the psychological constructs and theories that are associated with those states and behaviours to be elucidated and explored.

Exploration will involve appropriate methods to investigate what psychological constructs and theories relate to relevant behaviours and function.

The Science of Behaviour: Theory to Evidence

This module aims to introduce the conceptual and historical issues in psychology and the work of prominent figures who influenced the development of modern psychology. You will begin to explore key thinkers in psychology, focusing on how key thinkers design and conduct research in their field.

Human Cognition and Individual Differences

This module explores how we think (Cognitive Psychology) and how we differ from one another (Individual Differences).

The aim of this module is to introduce you to basic theory, research findings and methods of investigation in perception, attention, learning, memory, face and object recognition and problem-solving.

Developmental Psychology

Developmental Psychology involves the study of development and maturation in cognitive, personality and social processes.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to fundamental theory, research findings and methods of investigation in infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and overall lifespan development.

The module will aim to provide a critical understanding of ways in which behaviour is influenced by developmental factors, the nature of developmental processes, and ways in which empirical research can help us to understand how developmental processes influence what we do.

Research Methods: Experimental Design and Analysis

The module aims to develop an understanding of experimental designs and associated methods of analysis related to psychology, and introduces you to research ethics. The introduced methods are variants of Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), a method that allows comparison of groups and/or conditions.

Biological Psychology

Biological Psychology involves the study of the biological and psychological bases of mind and behaviour.

This module will introduce you to basic theory, research findings and methods of investigation in behavioural genetics, neuroscience and neuropsychology.

The module will aim to provide a critical understanding of the ways in which behaviour is influenced by biological factors, how we study these biological processes and why these processes are important in applied psychological settings.

Applied Counselling Psychology Skills and Client Issues

This module builds on core counselling skills, introducing deeper relational engagement through PCEPS skills development and applied ethical considerations. You will explore various client presenting issues, working with differences and diversity, and the relationship between counselling psychology and other approaches.

You will examine ethical dilemmas, professional boundaries, and power dynamics while enhancing self-awareness and relational depth. Through structured skills practice and experiential learning, you will develop the ability to apply theory to diverse client presentations, navigate ethical complexities in professional settings, and continue developing your counselling skills.

Research Methods: Survey & Qualitative Designs and Analysis

The module aims to develop an understanding of survey and qualitative designs and associated methods of analysis related to psychology.

The module will develop knowledge of survey and qualitative approaches to investigating and analysing psychological data. The relationship between correlational analysis and predictive reasoning will be outlined. Areas covered include multivariate analysis (multiple regression) and thematic analysis.

Independent Project

The Independent Project provides an opportunity to apply appropriate knowledge, concepts, techniques and research methods of psychology to an in-depth study of a particular question or problem related to psychology.

This module aims to foster a greater understanding of the processes involved in undertaking a research project and marks the culmination of your learning experience.

The study will enable you to produce a written research report, and a poster presenting a summary of your research and findings.

Project Management and Presentation Skills

This module enables you to deliver a wide range of skills, from project management to presentation of results in an accessible form.

In this module, you will have the opportunity to develop your project management skills, to further develop your scientific reasoning and reporting skills, and to learn skills necessary for producing a poster presenting research work.

Coaching and Health Psychology

The aim of this module is to introduce the professions of Health and Coaching Psychology as career options for psychologists. During this module, you will gain insight into the theory, practice, and research undertaken by health and coaching psychologists.

The Module will be divided into three parts covering:

1. Theoretical underpinnings of health and coaching psychology (e.g. Behaviour change models, Goal Setting); understanding the importance of life context, social inequalities and health literacy;
2. Applications of Health and Coaching Psychology whereby the role of each discipline will be applied to health-related case studies (e.g. living well with a range of long-term conditions) in order to highlight the benefit of working as part of multi-disciplinary teams;
3. The future of Health and Coaching Psychology as a career option: how bigger picture issues such as technology developments and the Anthropocene Age might impact approaches to coaching and health-related interventions will be explored.

Professional Journeys in Counselling Psychology

This module provides you with an opportunity to review and clarify many of the practice issues raised in previous modules, giving you a chance to continue to develop your ethical and professional awareness, as well as your employability.

Further aspects of employability, such as developing the CV, preparing for interviews and answering job applications, will be discussed.

You will have an opportunity to review and clarify your values and beliefs in relation to professionalism, assessment, outcome measures and contemporary developments in the world of counselling psychology and related professions.

Innovations in Psychological Therapies: Mindfulness and Brief Interventions

The aim of this module is to provide a critical understanding of mindfulness and compassion-focused psychotherapies, exploring their theoretical foundations and practical applications.

You will engage with specialist approaches used within therapeutic settings, developing insight into their effectiveness and suitability for diverse client needs.