Sessional Children's Counsellor

Responsible to: Counselling Team Manager

Location: NI Wide

Hours: Competitive

Payment: £30 per hour

Clinical Support: Individual clinical supervision. Available monthly – Reflective Group Supervision

Job Description:

This post supports delivery of Nexus Children’s Counselling Service. Nexus helps children from the age of 4 to deal and process issues relating to Sexual abuse and trauma. This may be delivered through a range of therapeutic disciplines including Play, Music, Clay, Art, or Integrative children’s therapeutic approaches.

Key Responsibilities:

• To work as part of Nexus team of trained child therapists who take a child-centred approach to counselling and supporting the children, their parents and carers.
• To assess requests for counselling from parents or carers, by engaging with parents/carers to build an understanding of the child, their family and the situation while identifying therapeutic goals to best support the child.
• To ensure an initial assessment will be completed with the child’s parent(s), caregiver(s) or legal guardian(s) to determine if this is the most appropriate service for the child.
• To be familiar with assessing for informed consent for counselling given by those with parental responsibility for the child in accordance with Gillick Competence Guidelines.
• To use a range of modalities including play, art and music therapies helping children to reduce stress and process feelings to help children develop and facilitate communication skills improve self-confidence and independence; enhance self-awareness and awareness of others.
• To deliver face-to-face safe and confidential counselling sessions on a flexible basis meeting the needs of young children.
• To attend monthly individual clinical supervision.
• To promote and manage effective communication with clients and key stakeholders whilst maintaining boundaries of confidentiality.
• To agree with the client and their caregiver a therapeutic contract for the work. This includes regularly reviewing progress through outcome measures recorded throughout counselling and through discussion with the client and parent/caregiver during parental reviews.

For further information and to apply, please see the downloadable documents below