RESOLUTION: “Unpaid volunteering jobs aimed at BACP registered and qualified counsellors remain an issue within our profession. We ask BACP to take a firm stance against counsellor exploitation and communicate with organisations advertising such jobs to make them aware of the importance of paying qualified therapists a decent, proportionate wage.“

Proposer: Marvis Stewart

Seconder: Maria Albertsen

Thank you for your interest in keeping updated about this resolution. Our aim is to let you know how the resolution is progressing, when you can expect it to be implemented and what you can do to support us. We will do this by providing a timeline of events below, with a ‘call for support’, if need be. Below this you will find the resolution in full, which we highly recommend you read as it states very clearly the actions we are asking BACP to take to implement it, as voted for by BACP members. At the bottom of this page you will find a comments section – please feel free to ask any questions or leave any comments here and a member of the team will respond to you as soon as possible. Thank you.

Timeline

November 2022 – Resolution is successful .

February 2023 – Keen to work on implementing the resolution, Marvis and Maria write to BACP to ask what the next steps are. They received a response on 17th February 2023 stating that the BACP Board of Governors and the Governance Team had discussed how to take forward the resolution at the meeting of the Board on 27th January 2023. They also stated that they would be contacted within the next two weeks with further details regarding the plans being put in place.

March 2023 –

• 10th March 2023 – Marvis and Maria received an email stating that the letter was now with the Chair of the Board of Governors for signature and they would hope to be able to send this to us in the next couple of days.
• 21st March 2023 – Marvis and Maria didn’t receive a response from BACP and so sent a follow-up email asking for a status update.
• 22nd March 2023 – BACP replied to apologise for the delay and said the letter would be sent either that evening or th following morning.
• 27th March 2023 – Marvis and Maria didn’t recieve the letter so sent a follow-up email to raise this.
• 29th March 2023 – BACP replied to apologise for the delay explaining there had been a ‘technical hitch’ and the letter would be sent as a priority.
• 29th March 2023 – LETTER FROM BACP BOARD RECEIVED (excerpt to be posted here soon).

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FULL RESOLUTION

RESOLUTION: “Unpaid volunteering jobs aimed at BACP registered and qualified counsellors remain an issue within our profession. We ask BACP to take a firm stance against counsellor exploitation and communicate with organisations advertising such jobs to make them aware of the importance of paying qualified therapists a decent, proportionate wage.“

Summary – the call to action

As unpaid volunteering positions aimed at BÄCP registered and qualified counsellors continue to be an issue within our profession, we ask that BACP takes a firm stance against counselor exploitation, We ask that BACP communicates with organisations advertising such positions to make them aware of the value of qualified BACP members and the importance of paying counsellors a fair, decent, proportionate wage.

We ask for BACP’s Workforce Employment Strategy Lead to engage with these organisations in order to send a clear message that BACP does not support unpaid work for their qualified members.

Additional Information

Big counseling organisations and chanties continue to advertise for placements and other unpaid roles for qualified bacp members. Qualified members continue to shoulder the costs of professional liability insurance, clinical supervision, professional membership and other outgoing costs while being asked to work for free. These roles push out the very edge of what is considered volunteering by stating a minimum term of up to two years, At the very extreme some counselors are actually charged a monthly fee by some organisations to volunteer for them, and in effect, they are literally paying to work for nothing.

BACP members are paying to work and risking increased debt to work unpaid roles which do not offer the legal protections of employed positions. This is unacceptable, counselors are people that also need to financially support themselves and often others.

Many qualified counsellors indeed choose to volunteer their skills and services when and how they can, and everyone should have the right to do so. BACP has stated that they find it unfair and unreasonable that qualified counsellors are finding themselves in a position to take unpaid work and that they believe the promotion of voluntary jobs or roles for qualified counselors contributes to the underfunding of counselling services. It is time for BACP, the largest counselling and psychotherapy membership body, to action this statement in measurable ways. We ask that BACP helps other organisations understand that when a counselor has achieved their qualification, it means they are indeed qualified to work and as such require payment for their work.

If this resolution is successful, the BACP Workforce Employment Strategy Lead will support members through actioning the following processes:

1. For the BACP Workforce Employment Strategy Lead to put together a working group to discuss, assess and create an action plan to tackle this issue. This group should consist at least three BACP members who are qualified therapists and selected via an interview process.

2. For the BACP Workforce Employment Strategy Lead to share said action plan with members as well as their strategy to address this issue within a reasonable time scale.

3. For the working group to actively research and communicate with any organisation that knowingly or unknowingly is using the accreditation loophole to ask for unpaid work from qualified counsellors.

4. We ask that the BACP working group create a letter and or statement template which strongly discourages the perpetuation of inequality and poverty by asking members to pay to work in an unpaid role.

5. The Workforce Employment Strategy Lead would then communicate with the BACP membership, via the annual report, an overview of the outcomes across the year which includes a clear percentage of how many communications resulted in organisational change.

This would provide BACP with concise data to report to their members on how they are tackling the culture of advertised unpaid work, and would provide us with some statistics as to how widespread this problem is. Additionally, it makes us aware of why these changes are not happening yet.

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