Certificate in Family Counselling Systemic Practice
Systemic Practice is a deeply fulfilling and transformative profession where you’ll empower families to overcome challenges, rebuild trust, and nurture meaningful connections. It’s about guiding couples and family systems toward clarity, healing and healthier communication.
This course is tailored for seasoned counselling professionals who are qualified at Diploma Level 4 (or equivalent) with a minimum of three years of counselling experience in agency settings and/or private practice and are ready to expand their impact and take their work to a deeper systemic level.
A skilled family counsellor wears many hats, including those of listener, strategist, mediator, and coach. Each one is essential in navigating the complexities of family systems. The role demands more than empathy; it calls for precision, insight, and relational intelligence.
Today, Systemic Therapists are utilised in organisations such as family courts, children’s services, educational institutions, social services, law enforcement and corporate programmes, as well as other mental health services.
CLASSES
Course Modules
Module 1: Mapping the System – Foundational Theories, Ethics & Professional Identity
Overview:
This introductory module presents the fundamental principles of systemic theory and examines how our ‘own’ relational contexts influence our professional identity. Trainees will critically engage with the ethical landscape of systemic family counselling and begin to explore their role within a wider network of meaning, culture, and power.
Key Topics Covered:
- Evolution of systemic theory: from first to second-order cybernetics
- Systemic assumptions: circularity, context, relational dynamics
- Ethical considerations in multi-person work (including safeguarding, power, and confidentiality)
- Developing a ‘self-as-therapist’ stance
- Relational responsibility and cultural reflexivity
Module 2: Beginning the Work – Engagement, Assessment & Early-Stage Interventions
Overview:
This module focuses on initiating family work, building engagement, and navigating the early stages of systemic practice. Trainees will learn how to conduct systemic assessments, involve multiple family members, and begin using key tools such as genograms, mapping, and systemic hypotheses.
Key Topics Covered:
- Making initial contact with families: the first meeting
- Systemic assessment and collaborative goal setting
- Genograms and family lifecycle frameworks
- Engaging children and young people in systemic work
- Managing initial anxiety and resistance in the early sessions
Module 3: Conversations that Matter – Communication, Power & Therapeutic Meaning
Overview:
This module explores the deeper layers of interpersonal communication, power, and meaning in therapeutic conversations. Drawing on concepts such as the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), trainees will learn how to navigate complex interactions while remaining reflexive and attuned to broader social discourses.
Key Topics Covered:
- Communication as context: unpacking relational messages
- Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) in practice
- Working with dominant discourses and positioning
- Systemic responses to high-conflict or ethically complex scenarios (e.g. domestic abuse)
- Using tentative language, curiosity, neutrality, and circular questioning to deepen conversations
Module 4: Beyond Boundaries – Integrating Models & Integrative Practice12
Overview:
This module introduces trainees to the integration of systemic therapy with other key modalities, including psychodynamic, cognitive, and behavioural approaches. The narrative metaphor is employed to connect theory and technique, providing a coherent approach to understanding and transforming family stories.
Key Topics Covered:
- Integrating systemic therapy with psychodynamic, cognitive and behavioural approaches
- Narrative therapy: lived vs. told stories
- Attachment Narrative Therapy (ANT) in family practice
- Externalising problems and re-authoring lives
- Making space for multiple truths and meaning systems
Module 5: Embracing Difference – Working with Culture, Identity & Family Structures
Overview:
This module invites trainees to explore the influence of social difference, intergenerational legacies, and cultural assumptions on family life and therapeutic engagement. It focuses on how families are shaped by and respond to wider societal forces.
Key Topics Covered:
- Cultural humility and systemic practice
- Generational narratives and family scripts
- Blended families, parental alienation, and loyalty conflicts
- Social constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class in therapy
- Inviting children’s and young people’s voices into conversations about difference
Module 6: Endings, Emotions & Reflective Practice
Overview:
In the final module, trainees will explore how systemic therapists make sense of emotional expression, endings, and transitions, both in therapy and in their personal development. The module focuses on endings as opportunities for reflection, growth, and the consolidation of learning and change.
Key Topics Covered:
- Emotions through a systemic/social constructionist lens
- The recursive role of the therapist in emotional conversations
- Using Appreciative Inquiry to support reflective closure
- Models for ethical and purposeful endings in therapy
- The role of supervision and self-reflexivity in sustainable practice
OBJECTIVES
Course Delivery
The programme is delivered through a variety of participatory and interactive methods such as:
- Lectures, Debates
- Presentations, Audio-visual materials
- Structured skills development and practice
- Group Exercises and Skills Practice
- Peer Observations and Reflexive groups
- Case presentations and a Supervision Clinic
This is NOT a clinical programme; however, there will be a strong emphasis on practical, experiential and academic work. Participants are asked to share their experiences with systemic client work as part of the process.
CLASSES
Asessment
Assessment is carried out through a blend of practical skills application, tutor observation, and the completion of two written assignments: a case presentation and a self-reflective practice paper.
These assignments are designed to demonstrate your achievement of the course’s learning outcomes and assessment criteria. All work is marked on a pass/fail basis. If your first submission does not meet the required standard, you will have the opportunity to resubmit once.
The overarching aim of the assessment process is to encourage and support you to:
- Engage fully in learning activities that align with the academic level of the course.
- Critically reflect on your progress, drawing on feedback from both peers and tutors.
- Take ownership of your learning journey and professional development.
OBJECTIVES
Assessment Components
Tutor-assessed and observed skills practice with feedback.
A 1,000-word (+/- 10%) reflective essay on your learning and practice experience.
A 1,500-word (+/- 10%) written casework assignment.
All assignments are assessed in line with BRFT standards and policies
OBJECTIVES