ABSTRACT
The individual membership of the British Association for Counselling (BAC) has grown to over 13,000 individuals and almost 800 organizations in just under 20 years. The membership providing counselling as part of their employment, the association has been a major forum for considering professional issues. Traditional professions are exclusive in that members have to have completed one of a limited set of courses and have obtained qualifications of sufficient academic or financial difficulty to restrict the numbers of new entrants. Historically, counselling has always much greater counter-establishment tendencies than its close 'cousins', counselling psychology and psychotherapy. The use of counselling within education and health care has highlighted a number of features of counselling which are potentially antagonistic to the ethos of the established professions. Counselling psychology has entrance requirements which exclude all non-graduate psychologists. The management of confidentiality is one of the most recurrent sources of ethical difficulty for counsellors.
