The Northpoint Wellbeing Scholarship for Integrative Counselling

In 2021, Leeds Beckett University formed a partnership with Northpoint Wellbeing, a local Yorkshire mental health charity. This collaboration seeks to support traditionally underrepresented people in the counselling and mental health professions.

The partnership has provided and continues to provide numerous scholarship opportunities. These aim to encourage Black, Asian, and other people of colour to train to become qualified practising therapeutic counsellors on the MA Integrative Counselling in Leeds Beckett's School of Health.

Northpoint Wellbeing also provides access to additional mentorship for scholarship-holders. Jon Davis, former Director at Northpoint Wellbeing, said: "We're always keen to attract more people of colour into counselling and mental health professions, so that we can better serve our communities. This scholarship is about signalling an intention for change in the sector, and we're proud to be working with Leeds Beckett towards this goal."

The aim of the scholarship fund and its mentorship is to support the development of a more diverse psychological therapies workforce.

Maryam Riaz, a Senior Lecturer in Counselling and Mental Health in the School of Health and a registered Psychotherapist said it's about getting the right approach: "Working with and targeting particular communities, we may need to take a targeted approach, for example, like the Northpoint Scholarship programme that we've introduced this year. It's specifically targeted to a community where counsellors and therapists are lacking, so we can improve the number of therapists available in the service.

"My personal experience of being the only person of colour as a trainee counsellor and subsequently working as a BAME practising counsellor highlighted the lack of qualified practising counsellors in the counselling and psychotherapy profession.

"My journey has shown that lack of representation can be a barrier for people of a BAME background to access and gain the appropriate mental health support they need. Not accessing these services adds to disparities in the quality of counselling and psychotherapy care BAME communities receive.

"To tackle this, we need to attract more BAME practitioners to the industry. If it wasn't for this scholarship, many of these students wouldn't have the opportunity to enter the profession and that's what we want. We want to be able to offer opportunities where students and people from disadvantaged backgrounds who may have never had the opportunity to pursue an MA in Integrative Counselling become qualified practitioners."

Find out more about the scholarship and others by visiting our bursaries and scholarships page, or the Northpoint Wellbeing Scholarship factsheet.