About the Course
What’s inside
Become a qualified psychotherapeutic counsellor!
This Level 5 Diploma has been designed to prepare learners to be empathic, effective and ethical practitioners whose work is grounded in an anti-oppressive praxis and ethos. Across 30 weeks you’ll gain the knowledge, skills and competencies needed to work as a self-employed counsellor in private practice.
The course is developed in line with CPCAB learning outcomes to achieve a CPCAB accredited Level 5 Diploma in Psychotherapeutic Counselling (PC-L5), delivered by the team at Headstrong — the UK’s leading placement provider.
Topics Covered in our Level 5 Training
Across 30 tutor-led sessions, this CPCAB-approved diploma follows five integrated parts — blending theory, skills practice, and reflective learning. Each part builds on the last to produce practitioners who can hold complex clinical material with confidence and care.
The 5 parts of the PC-L5 Diploma:
1. Anti-Oppressive Practice in Private Practice: Harm reduction, ethical dilemmas, and establishing a successful private practice.
2. Racialisation & Racial Trauma: Use of self, working with racialised identities, recognising and working with racial and social trauma.
3. Assessment & Supervision: Use of supervision, initial assessments and contracting, safeguarding and risk, working with diagnosis.
4. Working With Diversity: Queer identities, neurodiversity and disability, migrant stories and refugees, men’s mental health.
5. Working With Lived Experience: Self-awareness in the therapeutic space, holding anger and rage, holding shame and loss, care-giving and burnout.
The diploma combines theory, skills practice, and reflective learning to support practitioners in developing safe, ethical, and effective private practice.