Master of Counselling

At the heart of a career in counselling is a desire to help others. Build on the skills acquired in your previous degree or professional experience with UNE's accredited, flexibly delivered Master of Counselling. Underpinned by a humanistic philosophy that focuses on the person rather than the symptoms, our course equips you to support people in need with practical skills and advanced knowledge. Future proof your career as a registered counsellor, able to engage in professional, reflexive counselling practice in an environment of genuineness, acceptance, caring, compassion and empathy.

Why study the Master of Counselling with UNE?

Counsellors provide support to people of all ages who are experiencing challenges in their lives. Whether you are new to the profession or seeking to expand your current knowledge and skills, UNE’s Master of Counselling offers an integrative approach, with professional training and supervision that equips you with advanced knowledge and skills to enable you to work collaboratively with your clients, and create environments that facilitate personal insight, change and growth.

Our course is underpinned and informed by a Humanistic and Existential philosophical framework that deals with questions of meaning and freedom, grapples with what it means to be human, and emphasises the value of individual and collective agency.

Develop your skills in counselling, supervision and health and social research. Learn about the theories and concepts that underpin common research approaches to ensure that you have the right foundation to identify and select appropriate methods to answer particular research questions. You will also gain an in depth understanding of the processes that guide research design and practice. The course provides a pathway to UNE's Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), if you are interested in pursuing further research.

What makes our course different?

At UNE, we have been preparing students for a rich career in counselling for over 25 years. Our long established, specialist master’s course is taught by passionate and experienced academics and practitioners, ensuring that you gain the theoretical knowledge and practical skills required for contemporary, interdisciplinary, person-centred practice in the rapidly changing world of health and social care. With a focus on humanistic counselling approaches that require a commitment on the part of the counsellor to connect with others and explore what happens when those connections are made, you might find the learning experience of this course different to what you have experienced in the past.

Counsellor training requires independent, self-directed and reflexive learning. Our aim in this course is to provide you with the same growth-promoting learning environment that you will create for your clients. We support your development as a skilled professional, ready to respond to the challenges you may face in practice with emotional and psychological agility. Engagement with your teachers and peers throughout will assist to deepen your understanding of the humanistic approach to counselling, fostering genuineness, acceptance, caring, compassion and empathy. This course gives you opportunities to:

Equip yourself with professional training in a range of specialisations. Core units of the course include supervision theory and practice, and focus on giving you the skills and knowledge required to support people of all ages dealing with a range of issues including life transitions and relationships, addiction, abuse, mental health, and many other areas of health and wellbeing.

Choose your own pathway, with options for the Generalist Counselling Pathway, the Mental Health Practice Pathway or the Counselling Placement Pathway which includes 40 hours of face-to-face counselling, 10 hours of clinical supervision and 150 hours of agency-based activities.

Gain real research experience — UNE’s Master of Counselling includes a capstone research project, undertaken in your last trimester of study, where you choose a specialised area of counselling to investigate independently. With a collaborative approach and excellent support from your supervisor, you will produce a piece of professional research and demonstrate your skills in problem solving, critical thinking and analysis. If you wish, this can also be a pathway to further higher degree research in the School of Health.

Study flexibly — at UNE, our counselling students come from a wide range of backgrounds, and we know that you need to balance study with family, work and other commitments. Flexibility is the key to our online learning programs, and we offer options that allow you to study units across UNE's trimesters allowing you to tailor your program of study to your individual needs.

By choosing UNE, you are choosing an industry leader in the provision of online lifelong learning. Year after year, students award UNE the maximum 5-star ratings for Overall Experience and Student Support in The Good Universities Guide. When you choose UNE, you are setting yourself on a pathway to a rewarding future.

Study online

Most of our students choose to study online across three study periods with 24/7 tutor support* and fit study around work and family commitments. Uniquely, our online students are mostly over 30 and bring valuable experience with them. They form a community of adults juggling the same challenges and priorities and who bring their life and work experience together at UNE in order to become future-fit and better respond to a rapidly changing world.

24/7 tutor support includes: essay feedback (within 24 hours); live chat 24/7 for generic feedback on academic writing; and subject-specific help at a foundation or first-year level for subjects including mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics, business, accounting, microeconomics, macroeconomics and statistics. There are also a wide range of workshops, resources and courses available in academic skills support to assist you and help you to succeed.