Senior Counsellor Leicester and Coventry: JOB DESCRIPTION
The Laura Centre first opened in 1991. Since the centre has grown and evolved around the needs of our service users. We aim to provide a holistic range of support when a child dies or is bereaved. Counselling is at the heart of our service, though we offer other support, including complimentary therapies, community events, and a variety of group work.
We have a diverse counselling team with differences in age, modality, experience, hours worked, and focus of work (for instance some counsellors only work with adults, some mostly children, some a mixture).
The Centre provides an exciting opportunity for a counsellor to work using a variety of methods - individual, couples, family and group counselling - and with a wide diversity of clients. The work can be demanding and stressful but also immensely rewarding. The need for personal, professional supervision is recognised and provision is made for the payment of supervision fees to an external supervisor, selected by the individual counsellor and approved by the organisation. Time is also allocated for regular continuing professional development, clinical review and peer support amongst the counselling team.
Summary job description:
Job title: / Senior CounsellorResponsible to: / CEO
Place of work: / Leicester and Coventry, other areas as agreed.
Hours: / 37
Salary: / £35,000 – £40,500 depending on qualifications and experience
.
Starting date:
Length of Contract / As agreed
Permanent
Key tasks and responsibilities:
Job summary:
The role is one of two senior counsellor posts within TLC. Some of the responsibilities outlined below will be shared between the two senior counsellor posts. The duties outlined below will be applicable across Leicester and Coventry offices and occasionally the Derby office as required.
1. Responsible for the management, development and delivery of therapeutic services for all clients referred to the Laura Centre. All will have been affected by a significant bereavement, often involving trauma. This includes children, teenagers, adults, couples and families. Some of these individuals and families have complex needs.
2. Contribute to the development and delivery of all training provided by the Laura Centre.
3. Contribute to specialised clinical and teaching input into the Laura Centre.
4. Work jointly with colleagues advising on and providing therapeutic interventions. 70% of the role is directly or indirectly clinical.
5. Manage the delivery of specifically funded projects and have responsibility to ensure that projects are delivered within agreed budgets and targets and outcomes are achieved.
6. Hold budgetary responsibility for various projects within The Laura Centre.
7. Provide reports to funders and other stakeholders.
8. Contribute to the coordination and delivery of all continuing professional development for the therapeutic team at The Laura Centre.
9. Hold line management responsibility for allocated counsellors at The Laura Centre.
10. As a member of the Senior Management Team contributes to the strategic planning and service development of The Laura Centre.
11. Lead on developing and maintaining policies and practice to all therapeutic work is delivered within the BACP ethical framework and is compliant with locally agreed safeguarding and Child Protection principles.
12. Responsible for monitoring and evaluation of all aspects of our therapeutic and training service.
13. Write or contribute to funding applications that require clinical input.
14. Responsible for ensuring all allocated counsellors have appropriate clinical supervision.
15. Provide clinical supervision for volunteer counsellors as well as for external supervisees as required.
16. Represents and speaks for The Laura Centre at local and national fora.
17. Reports to the Chief Executive and the Trustees.
Duties and responsibilities
1. Clinical
- Provide an expert therapeutic service to clients and families. This involves working with highly emotive and complex issues, requiring the use of advanced levels of listening, analytical and communication with families.
- Undertake assessment and therapeutic interventions with children, young people, adults and couples. Both functions require highly developed and specific skills and knowledge in psychotherapy and bereavement, and the ability to observe and understand verbal and non-verbal communication.
- Develop and jointly facilitate specialist group therapeutic interventions for children, adolescents and adults. This requires ability to work sensitively and collaboratively with colleagues and also to observe and understand verbal and non-verbal communication from a number of different individuals in the same room at the same time.
- Assumes full clinical responsibility for the management of his/her own caseload, exercising full professional autonomy for decisions. Manages exposure to traumatised and potentially difficult clients, exercising autonomous professional judgement around levels of risk and any necessary risk management strategies.
- Contributes to the clinical management of cases across the therapeutic team including through facilitating clinical issues meetings. This includes issues of prioritisation, risk management and coordination of team working.
- Is responsible for ensuring that all therapeutic staff have an understanding and respect for practice which recognises individual and cultural diversity and difference.
- Keeps up to date with the latest research and developments in therapy and bereavement.
- Provides appropriate clinical input into referral meetings and to meeting with other agencies.
- Develop and write specialist information and advice resources for our client group and for other professionals.
2. Clinical supervision
- Provides clinical supervision to volunteer counsellors and additional supervision if required to other therapeutic staff.
- Provides clinical supervision or consultancy to professional staff from other agencies as required.
- Receives and utilises clinical supervision from an appropriately qualified clinical supervisor.
3. Management
- Shares line management and budgetary responsibility for all counsellors at The Laura Centre.
- Ensure policies and procedures are regularly reviewed to ensure good safe practice is maintained.
- Ensure appropriate procedures are in place to manage referrals, waiting lists and assessments.
- Ensure we have appropriate systems in place to manage risk for therapeutic work.
- Provide a programme of Continuing Professional Development that supports the delivery of an excellent service.
- Manage the delivery and reporting on all specifically funded therapeutic and training projects.
- Contributes to the recruitment of therapeutic staff.
- Oversee the design and delivery of the group programme. To ensure that we have appropriate therapeutic groups available for children, adolescents and adults who access our service.
- Deputise for the Chief Executive Officer as required.
- Write regular therapeutic service reports for the Trustees. Contribute reports for other stakeholders and AGM as required.
- Leads on recruitment, training and support of all volunteer counsellors
4. Funding
- Write fundraising applications to grant making and statutory bodies. To include calculation of budgets, evaluation of clinical work, validating research and evidence of need and difference.
- Contribute written material and therapeutic and budgetary input to fundraising applications written by others.
- Liaise and meet with potential funders as part of the fundraising application process
- Liaise and provide reports for funders on projects
- Contribute to the strategic development and funding of the service.
5. Partnership working, training and research
- Engages with the voluntary sector nationally, regionally and locally
- Attend and contribute to relevant networking meetings
- Engage with stakeholders to develope the profile of TLC
- Contribute as required to a range of training courses, programmes, lectures and conferences.
- Contribute to ensuring that funded training programmes are delivered and achieve milestones, targets and outcomes as agreed.
- Work to ensure that the most is made of opportunities to generate revenue from training where appropriate.
- Develop and forge partnerships with other organisations and individuals to engage in joint working to produce resources and information to support bereaved individuals and families nationally and internationally.
- Work collaboratively with other individuals and organisations to further the interests of our client group at a national level, including influencing policy and practice.
- Contribute to the development of research initiatives in the bereavement field.
- Contribute articles or material to specialist publications in bereavement field when requested
- Attends appropriate courses/conferences for Continuing Professional Development as agreed with the Chief Executive Officer.
- Continues to develop own therapeutic, teaching and training skills and maintains awareness of current practices through attendance of appropriate training courses, study days and workshops.
6. Monitoring and evaluation
- Lead on ensuring that robust systems are in place to monitor the efficacy and value of our therapeutic work.
- Work with other staff to ensure that our clinical database is capable of providing appropriate data for monitoring processes.
- Lead on the development and use of appropriate clinical assessment and outcome tools. Work with others to develop specialised bereavement tools which assess the needs, vulnerabilities and progress of our client group.
7. Other duties
- Contribute to the development and delivery of all other aspects of the Laura Centre.
- To attend all TLC events as required-this will require some weekend working
- As appropriate deal with ad hoc issues that may arise with the premises or other services that ensure the smooth running of the centre.
- Liaise with accounting and administrative staff over issues related to project or service delivery.
- Attend and provide input into regular budget meetings.
- Attend and contribute to regular Senior Management Team and Trustee Meetings.
Person Specification
The following table shows the criteria that we will be assessing in short-listing applications and the recruitment process.
Criteria / Essential / Desirable / Where assessed:(for key – see below)
A good standard of general education / X / A
A recognised qualification in counselling, psychotherapy, psychology or systemic therapy / X / A
5 years post qualifying experience as a practising therapist or counsellor / X / A
Accreditation, or eligible for and working towards accreditation with UKCP, BACP or equivalent professional body. / X / A
Experience of managing counsellors / X
Experience of working therapeutically with children and adults / X / A, I
Professional training in therapeutic work with children and teenagers and an understanding of developmental issues / X / A, I
Experience of carrying out initial assessments / X / A, I
Experience of working with families / X / A, I
Experience of working with couples / X / A, I
Experience of facilitating groups / X / A, I
Understanding of, and the ability to be at ease with, the experience and consequences of bereavement / X / A, I, G
Knowledge of a range of therapeutic approaches with a sympathy towards client centred work / X / A, I
Excellent interpersonal skills with the ability to confidently build and maintain good relationships with people from a wide variety of backgrounds and ages. / X / I, G
Willingness to be part of a small team and to share openly with colleagues / X / I,G
Evidence of self motivation and ability to use initiative and to work independently / X / A,I
Emotional maturity, stability and resilience / X / I, G
Willingness to seek support and guidance appropriately when difficulties arise in the course of work / X / I, G
Openness and willingness to share successes and failures for mutual learning / X / I
Good sense of humour / X / G
The ability to experience and convey empathy, congruence and acceptance to people from a wide range of backgrounds and ages / X / I, G
Ability to manage referrals and maintain an accurate PC based confidential system of records / X / A
Flexible team player, with the ability to be adaptable to stressful and/or changing situations / X / A,I
A= Application form, Interview = Individual interview, G = Group meeting with some TLC counsellors.
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