College Counselling Service Expansion: A First Step

The College has expanded the space available to the Student Counselling and Mental Health Advice Service, by renovating space in the old unoccupied Bernard Sunley hall in Evelyn Gardens. The new space opened on 7th October.

The budget for the expansion was around £150,000, which was used to convert and furnish five rooms in the building into counselling spaces – as well as a reception and a waiting room for students, a necessity which had been missing at the service’s South Kensington location in the Sherfield Building.

The new rooms will be used by three full-time counsellors hired by the service last year, for whom there was previously no available space in Sherfield – bringing the total up to 9.6 full-time equivalent staff. As Claire Fox, the Senior Student Counsellor, put it: “this is just the space we need to simply do our job – previously, we were offered resources but not the space, so we couldn’t give a meaningful offering from that.”

Rosie Summerhayes, the head of the service, said that the goal has always been to see students within 7-10 working days of referral – but that the lack of space has made that impossible, with the average wait time climbing from 8.2 working days in 2014-15 to 23.0 days in 2018-19.

Alongside the expansion, the service is also trialling a new system for conducting the first meeting with students, dubbed the ‘initial conversation’. By cutting the length of these meetings to 30 minutes instead of 50, while still ensuring the initial conversations take place with an experienced counsellor, students are now being seen much earlier than they previously would have.

Claire expanded on this: “I am sure that any of us would be glad to have an initial conversation with a specialist – it’s much better than waiting several weeks only to find that counselling isn't the right solution. It’s a triage assessment; we want to encourage students to start a conversation about what is troubling them and be heard, and then we can suggest the right support for them.”

The new system has received positive feedback so far, with students reportedly preferring to be seen quicker to develop an initial action plan than to wait for a longer session – but it will be assessed throughout the year based on student feedback.

Shervin Sabeghi, the Deputy President (Welfare) of the Union, was involved in hiring the new counsellors over the summer. He commented that he is “confident that it will result in far fewer students getting stuck in the system and not receiving the support they need.”

“I plan to keep up-to-date with how these changes affect waiting times and the student experience with the service throughout the year – so it’s important for students to give feedback.”

The space has been praised as being a major improvement, by Shervin as well as the counsellors. Although concerns have been raised about the distance to Evelyn Gardens – a 20 minute walk from the South Kensington campus – Rosie believes this can be a positive.

“It gives students time to think about what they want to talk about on the way here, and time to decompress on their way back. Counselling is not always a joyous experience – it can be upsetting or disturbing. You need space between yourself and the rest of the world.” A similar benefit is offered by the new waiting room.

She feels that this is emphasised when considering other wellbeing provisions, such as in departments: “you can’t just flip back to being a functioning student upon opening the door. You need to go to a different space, talk about it, and then you leave it behind – rather than it being contained in your department.”

There is an essential importance to the feeling and particularly the entrance to a counselling building. Both Rosie and Claire stressed the need for it to be discrete, safe, and professional – for students to feel like they can share freely and to feel able to contain any problems they have to that space. This was, in fact, the primary consideration when new venues were being considered over the past several years – both in South Kensington and at other campuses such as White City or Hammersmith Hospital.

The new space caters well to this, being placed off-site. There are, however, downsides – other than the distance, which may become a problem during exam time. The budget for the renovation ran out before all available rooms could be refitted, meaning that there are several available rooms which are still empty. This is despite the fact that the old hall has been vacant for four years.

This leaves a lot of room for future expansion, which is useful as Rosie foresees the need for eventual growth to twelve counsellors in order to tackle the load during the busiest times of year.

Year on year, there is incremental growth on the number of students utilising counselling – growth far above that of the overall student population. The number of students confirming and attending appointments has risen by anywhere from 11% to 22.1% each successive year for a total increase of 76.2% since 2014-15, as compared to a total student population growth of 19.2% in the same time frame. Already, the service feels that it is “outgrowing” the space, as there is an evident need to expand the Mental Health Advice team. However, the transient nature of the student populace poses challenges in this regard.

“October to November and January through March are very busy times of year. Having the staff to reach the 7 to 10 day goal in busy times means having a lot of staff with not enough to do at other times.”

In considering the possibility of interim staff for busy periods, further problems arise. Any student could then form a good relationship with a counsellor that they could not then speak to later – which especially affects PhD students who are at the College year-round. There are also problems with training new staff simply to have them leave immediately afterwards, as well as finding skilled candidates who only want short-term work.

The end result is that the 7 to 10 day goal is an “average” throughout the year, with waiting times rising and falling around that benchmark.

The newly available space could also potentially accommodate other wellbeing services that need to expand. The Disabilities Advisory Service (DAS) is similarly crammed into Sherfield, with offices spread across the 5th floor – and entrances located right outside lecture theatres, which can make students feel awkward to enter.

This potential is one that inspires Rosie in particular, who shared a personal vision for a bespoke ‘wellbeing hub’ for students. This would house the Student Counselling and Mental Health Advice Service as well as the DAS, along with other provisions for students’ holistic wellness.

Hannah Bannister, the Director for Student Services, shared this viewpoint: “I’d like a ‘student centre’ bringing together most of the non-departmental services in one place that students can access – including the services in my remit such as the DAS, counselling, and the careers service, but also others such as registry services. Students should be able to come with any question and get an answer or see someone quickly.”

However, a centralised hub near South Kensington would not address one of the core problems still facing the counselling service: the lack of an office in White City – although Hannah suggests that should the White City campus grow, hubs could be included in both places.

Counselling have been trying to find a space in White City for around seven years, but have thus far only been offered spaces that were unusable or were eventually bookmarked for other uses. Recent attempts began approximately 2.5 years ago, the first of which ended in the space being given to medicine – and unfortunately, nothing was reserved for the service when chemistry moved to the campus. Successively, new spaces were offered, but each was turned down due to the inappropriate nature of the entrance. Several had full glass fronts and were adjacent to academics’ offices and work spaces or common rooms for students – a failure to acknowledge the particular essential needs of the counselling service.

A similar problem has arisen at Hammersmith Hospital, which is a short walk from White City. Although counselling has been offered there for eight years, the area outside the meeting room has now been renovated to feature working desks, rendering the office unusable for counselling – it will be shut down next week. Although an alternative allocated space has been identified for use five days a week, it is outside lecture theatres – and needs to be completely refurbished, meaning it will not open until at least the 6th of January.

The frustration at this situation is pervasive – however, it is outmatched by the strong sense of future potential that is felt throughout the service. There is no sense of complacency. Instead, there is a strong desire to improve and grow further to meet the needs of students – and in particular to engage in interlinked initiatives with other wellbeing services across the College community. Claire explained:

“The strength that the student counselling and mental health team have at Imperial is that we are an embedded, integrated service – not an outsourced agency providing it for the university. We are embedded because we are based at the College, and integrated because we talk to and work alongside academic departments and other support teams. We have that holistic view of the whole student experience and understand the student journey – we aren’t in a bubble, we are linked in. I want to see more such linkage.”

Currently, decisions at the College are often made in isolated “silos” – for example, every faculty addresses wellbeing and mental health on a separate basis, rather than fully coordinating jointly, which could lead to disparities in the support available to different students.

A ‘Task and Finish Group’, led by Hannah, recently looked into how to ensure parity of support across the College – as Claire explained it, “we want to have consistency across the whole university, so you know exactly what support you have access to regardless of what department you are in.” The group found that broadly the provision is equal across departments. More essentially, it found a lot of positive benefit to meeting in person – and so also plans to propose setting up a network of student support practitioners, where developments and learning can be shared, and recommendations can be made that can then be put before a decision-making body with a unified voice. This is another step towards the idea of “joined-up thinking.”

The resulting feeling is that this is just the first step in a much broader push for resource allocation to wellbeing services – a vital change given the College’s notoriously low student satisfaction scores. Hannah is already pushing for consideration of this:

“The College is considering a proposed Student Support Strategy created in collaboration with last year’s Union Officer Trustees, which will hopefully be signed off next week as College policy. One of the strands in that is asking the College to commit to considering students and student needs when planning discussions around space, as the College is fundamentally changing toward a multi-campus approach.”

As best summated by Claire herself:

“The whole conversation around space is really about value – it’s about the priority we put on student experience and their mental wellness. What is the value that Imperial is placing on that; what are they doing about it; what space are they offering. There is no point in just talking a big game. You have to actually walk the talk. This is a great start here – but it’s not the end of the road. Let’s keep moving forward, and keep momentum in terms of the big picture of student support.”