FAQ Pastoral Narrative Therapy Course
These are questions that you might have been wondering about.
Once the deposit is paid, can I start with the programme?
Yes and no. Formally class only commences by the end of January. Yet a lot of learning can take place up to then. Once a deposit (or at least the registration fee) is paid prospective students are encouraged to join the learning website narrativeacademy.co. Specifically ‘request to join’ the following groups: Once you have created your profile and clicked on the verification link sent to the email you provided, navigate to the ‘groups’ tab and use the filter to isolate ‘prospective learning groups’ Request to join the relevant group. Soon the new class groups will be created for the following year. It will be called Pastoral Narrative Therapy 23PNT1 (communication group). That’s where the meeting of students and even early topic discussions start. It’s a social learning website, so feel free to engage anyone in the group you joined. Some lecturers also join the relevant groups and become part of the conversations.
Can I open up a practice after the two-years?
Yes, but you will have to work under supervision and register with CPSC (or at least SignoPro up until such time that you can register at CPSC). Supervision is a requirement of most helping professions (for some even up to PhD level). Coram Deo third year options offer a university recognised practitioner supervision programme Yet, students can also approach any qualified supervisor in the industry at that point and set up supervision conversations/appointments. This can happen for instance at a ratio of having 1 supervision conversation after every 10 client sessions. The Coram Deo supervision programme however offers a community to help guide and develop practitioners and covers many aspects that go beyond the scope of normal supervision.
What is the difference between postgraduate, CPD continuous learning, and an honour’s degree?
This is an important question and unfortunately requires a slightly longer answer after which there may still be confusion.
All helping professions offer foundational and continuous training. This is not necessarily offered by universities. You will need to have undergone foundational training in order to do counselling formally. The two-year programme in pastoral narrative therapy offers foundational training. CPD courses or short courses won’t help much if you have no foundational training.
CPD courses on the other hand serve the purpose of helping those after foundational training to continue to learn and develop. This is sometimes called continuous education, or continuous professional development and is also a requirement for anyone who formally goes into counselling (such as establishing a practice). It only becomes necessary after foundational training and usually professional associations have different ‘amount of attendance ‘point’s that need to be acquired in a given year. Some CPD courses can be open to the public as interest courses. They are not intended to qualify a person to do counselling but to encourage life long learning in the interest of clients. Coram Deo has a portfolio of about 10 CPD courses for those who completed foundational training or is then offered as interest courses.
Postgraduate refers to formal education offered by universities. Postgraduate ‘level’ is regarded as Honour’s, Master’s, and Doctorate (PhD) degrees. These degrees are only open to people who formally enroled and completed the earlier degree: Bachelor’s (requirement for Honour’s) and so on. And this is only relevant in a specific discipline. In other words: The Honour’s must be in a relevant discipline if wanting to do a Master’s degree. In turn universities will not allow doing a PhD if the Master’s degree was not in the same discipline. But then how, for instance, can a nurse or teacher become a qualified counsellor?
Universities have in some instances what is specifically called postgraduate diplomas which is seen somewhat (though not formally) comparative to an Honour’s degree. Postgraduate diploma’s may not everywhere be seen as formal education (like a Bachelor’s, Honour’s or Master’s degree) but plays an important role that might lead to further formal education. In this scenario only will a postgraduate diploma offered by the same university you intend to continue your studies recognise the postgraduate diploma as sufficient for doing a Master’s degree (though there might be additional other selection criteria).
Coram Deo is not a university and therefore cannot formally say the programme is on bachelors, honors or other level. The university is our tertiary partner. This means that our programmes are highly regarded by and thus receive recognition from the particular university we are in partnership with. Under this arrangement the two-year programme is credit bearing to the postgraduate diploma and saves students at that point an estimated at least R15,000 in university fees should they qualify to continue with the postgraduate diploma. They still however need to have completed a Bachelor’s degree or in its absence have gone through an RPL (recognition of prior learning) process at the tertiary institution.
It is not that our programme (PNT) does not meet a particular standard for, say, a Bachelors degree. In fact, having worked at university level as managing director, our PNT programme’s strong point is that it meets students at their level of experience and proficiency. But it has enough notional hours to qualify (if we ever were to register it separately from our university partner) on a Masters’ degree level. But that will immediately make the programme inaccessible to the people we want to reach as they will need at least an Honour’s to enrol. Our aim is to train hope-collaborators irrespective of whether they are parents, teachers, a psychology student, aspiring counselor, someone part of a ministry team – everyone.
In our discipline, though ideal, a formal university Honour’s or Master’s degree is not needed to do counselling formally. The counselling and other professional bodies play a much more important role in who can do counselling than universities. Coram Deo helps with that but in some cases also leads to being able to enrol for postgraduate diploma admission at the university with a prerequisite of a bachelors degree in any discipline.
What NQF level is the programme?
The programme is not formally registered on the NQF framework although one can work on a comparative NQF level. We work alongside our recognition partner the University of Pretoria. There the programme is recognised on two levels: The Centre for Faith and Community (a centre of the faculty of theology, a world renowned theological faculty) and the enterprises division of the university that typically deals with continuing education. University of Pretoria Enterprises is a fully owned entity by the University of Pretoria.
Should we register the programme on the NQF framework this leads to many challenges such as that we have to exclude certain audiences. The programme consists of enough notional hours and can be done (don’t have to) on a very high level comparative to masters degrees (NQF9). That would mean that only formal honours degree students can enroll. If we register it at lower levels, typically diploma or degree (NQF6) that will likely disqualify for the the programme to serve as the course work aspect on masters degree level.
Our aim is however to train as many as we can in hope-collaboration whether they are (become) counsellors, psychologists (who expand their skillset with pastoral or narrative therapy), or then teachers, parents, managers and community workers.
At the moment the programme is used on a comparative NQF7 level in order to articulate into the tertiary partner framework.
What is important however is that the programme can lead to higher NQF levels via the university partnership and that the two-year programme does lead to registration with the formal body for pastoral counselling.
What is the formal description of the programme?
The programme is registered as Advanced Programme in Pastoral Narrative Therapy
What is the relationship with the university?
Most of our courses (including the PNT programme) are recognised by the University of Pretoria (UP), through its UP Enterprises division in collaboration with the Faculty of Theology’s, Centre for Faith and Community.
The university distinguishes between formal degrees, and ongoing education and training. Most universities do not offer formal qualifications below bachelor’s degrees. In this case they do however have a division/entity through which short and advanced programmes are offered. Through our relationship with UP the PNT programme is recognised by them internally. Although participants will need a bachelor’s degree (or have gone through an RPL process) they will then receive credits if they continue with UP’s postgraduate diploma in theology.
