ABSTRACT
As increasing numbers of students enter higher education, the role of student counselling services needs to evolve and develop to meet the needs of all students. These have changed, and the severity of mental difficulties has increased in the past few years. There is a trend towards increasing proportions of students being severely disturbed. There is concern at the rising number of students of all ethnicities attending higher education counselling services with severe mental difficulties and that the majority of counsellors are white, and they come from what may loosely be termed, a relatively middle-class background. Ethnic minority students are under-represented in number amongst students using student counselling services.
These factors, and the realisation of the important role that the student counselling service plays in supporting the individual student through emotional and psychological difficulties, led one university counselling service to the view that intrinsic changes were necessary. This chapter explores the ways the particular student counselling service evolved actively to offer a service based on student need and equal opportunity, and describes the recruitment of a multi-cultural staff team, the embracing of the differences within team members, the acknowledgement of student needs and ways of working with ethnic and cultural differences within the counselling process. This approach for determining effective support for all categories of students needs to be taken seriously.
