Student_Counselling_Center

Academic Writing Project 1 Counselling Services are an important provision in university life. However funding is extremely limited. Analyse the information you find in the annual report http://www.leeds.ac.uk/uscs/downloads/Annual%20report%200607.pdf and make recommendations for either cutting or increasing the budget. Yu-Pu (Carrie)Hsieh 14 July 2010 Graeme Harrop AESPIO Word Count:367 The student counselling centre is a crucial department at the University of Leeds in many ways. According to the Annual Report, it provide not only individual counselling but also group work and trainings to students and faculties of the University to make the learning environment as supportive as possible. (The Student Counselling Centre, 2007) However, there has limited funding to help a growing number of people who need counselling services with different issues. During our learning process at university, there are various concerns or troubles stop us from continuing our study or take us away from normal daily lives. As can be seen from the report that there are 1699 students used the counselling service in 2007, 9% more than the number of 2006, almost 70% of them attended individual counselling, which are excluding countless calls from students’ families, friends or university staff who are looking for information. These students have all kinds of problems within their university lives including relationship, academic and depression. (The counselling centre,2007) The counseling service aims to guide these students toward the best way to complete their degree or even prevent them from abnormal behaviour such as suicides.(Rickinson,1998) From the self evaluation in the report, it can be seen that 97% of clients are very satisfied with their counseling experiences in 06/07 (The counseling center,2007), 36% of clients ,who gave their evaluation feedback, decided that they will stay at the university to complete their degree in 2009(Humphrys,2010),which prove the counseling service effective and it’s necessary to lots of students. Nevertheless, even if the demand is increasing, the funding is still limited. Therefore, the total number of people on the waiting list almost double from 2007 to 2009(Humphrys,2010) ,indicating that it’s difficult for them to get immediate help when students encounter difficulties now. With more funding, The Student Counselling Centre will both bring in more practices to facilitate students’ accesses to these services and hire more counsellors to provide services to reduce the waiting time.(Humphrys,2010) Counselling services is one of the top priorities to invest more funding in for their effectiveness, more importantly, a well qualified university should provide adequate help and assistant to their students to ensure students’ mental health and wellbeing. References HUMPHRYS N. 2010. Counselling and International Students. lecture notes distributed in AESPIO, University of Leeds, 14 July THE STUDENT COUNSELLING CENTRE. 2007 . The Annual Report2006/07[online].[13 July 2010]. Available from: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/uscs/downloads/Annual%20report%200607.pdf RICKINSON B.(1998) ‘The relationship between undergraduate student counseling and successful degree completion’, Studies in Higher Education, 23.1.95 - 102