Introduction

This chapter explores the work of counsellors across institutions of higher education (HE). The shift in culture within institutions of higher education to a more business-based model has a trickle-down effect on the experience of students. It raises levels of performance anxiety, and inhibits the sense of undergraduate years being about more than just gaining a qualification. Yet, identity issues cannot easily be supressed, and they are uppermost in students' presenting issues at university counselling services. Many students approach these services with concerns about academic work but these issues are often underpinned by deeper anxieties about relationships, self-esteem and unresolved conflicts within families of origin. Indeed, academic work, eliciting the need to prove oneself in competition against one's peers, may magnify existing insecurities about the self and bring them to the fore.