Youth Access members have come together to form a new national Youth Counselling Working Group. The working group brings together senior counselling practitioners from Youth Access YIACS (youth information, advice and counselling services) to identify and work collectively to tackle key training, workforce and practice issues impacting on youth counselling services.
The working group will be working closely with colleagues from the British Association for Counsellors and Psychotherapy (BACP) to improve young people's access to counselling services across the UK. The BACP's Jo Holmes has written a guest blog for Youth Access on why the BACP is supporting the initiative, and what she hopes we can achieve together.
To mark the launch of the working group, we are making available a previously unpublished report on young people's experience of YIACS, featuring rich qualitative data and first-hand testimonies from young people. The report was produced as part of our national study on the effectiveness of counselling in community settings, for which we've also published a new summary briefing. Together, these reports present compelling evidence for the positive impact counselling can have on young people's lives, and the importance of YIACS as local, open-access services.
Read our new report "Young people's experience of counselling in community settings: An Evaluation of Service Questionnaire analysis" below.