The number of students making use of the Student Counselling Service has fallen for the first time in six years, while the number of emergency appointments attended has risen by over 150 per cent since 2010.
Figures seen by The University Times show that the number of students using the service, whether online, in group or in one-to-one sessions, fell from 1,899 in the 2014/15 to 1,879 last year. However the number of one-to-one appointments rose during the same period from 1,631 to 1,718.
Speaking to The University Times over email, Chuck Rashleigh, a student counsellor with the service, attributed these figures to “a decrease in the number of students using our Online Support Programmes”.
The Student Counselling Service reserves one emergency hour per weekday for those in need of urgent assistance. Rashleigh noted that “the number of attended emergency appointments now well alone exceeds days of the year”. The emergency appointments, Rashleigh says, are “increasingly resource-intensive”.
The number of students using the counselling service has also increased since 2009, rising by 68 per cent. The number of one-to-one sessions has also increased by 109 per cent since 2007.
The latest figures for 2015/16 reveal that 15 per cent of students used the counselling service or Student Learning Development – the highest figure on record. In comparison, the number of students using solely the Student Counselling Service fell to 10.7 per cent, the lowest figure since 2013.
Trinity was able to maximise its reach in 2014 with an enhanced online service. Rashleigh explained this saying: “Online users peaked in 2013-14 when we had additional staff working on a research project.” The Student Counselling Service plan to reintroduce this project through their internship programme in the coming months.
In 2014, concerns were raised about the Student Counselling Service after cuts to its budget, with questions raised over the ability of the service to actually provide its service, faced as it was with rising student numbers. A draft counselling service annual report, from September 2014, pointed to “unprecedented funding cuts and stead referral increases” as posing a “significant, on-going risk” to the service.
The figures seen by The University Times also revealed a dramatic growth in the number of students volunteering in the Student to Student (S2S) service. While in 2011 only 157 S2S mentors were trained, in 2014 734 students volunteered as part of the service.
Rashleigh added that the S2S programme “is staffed by a relatively small team for the size of the programme. They are in need of improved IT systems to keep things going at the levels they’ve delivered lately”.
