Annual Report 2024-25

This is an excerpt of the full report.

This excerpt includes Executive Summaries for Key Stakeholders; Feedback and Outcomes;Trends, Challenges and Opportunities Ahead and Looking Forward.

For a copy of the full report, please contact J.Goodman.4@warwick.ac.uk and Baljit.K.Sandhu@warwick.ac.uk.

1.0 Purpose of Report

This report offers a comprehensive overview of the activities, impact, and developments within the Counselling and Psychotherapy Services (CAPS) over the past academic year 2024-25. It aims to highlight key achievements, reflect on service challenges, and identify future planning. The report also serves to ensure transparency in how CAPS supports students and contributes to the wider university community and all stakeholders.

2.0 Executive Summaries for Key Stakeholder Groups

“I am very grateful for the work that [the therapist] put into our sessions and for the service the university provides. It feels like the university truly wants to support us and be on our side during our struggles. Many thanks.”

2.1 Overview

Through the year CAPS worked with a record number of students delivering timely, professional therapy aimed at supporting students to succeed in their academic task.

We continued to adapt our services to meet the evolving needs of students and the direction being set by the Director of Wellbeing and Safeguarding.

Our focus remained on providing accessible, high quality therapy for students that has positive clinical impact on academic outcomes and supports the University 2030 strategy of ‘Excellence with Purpose’.

2.2 Executive Summary for University Senior Leadership demonstrating

·Expenditure and Return on Investment (RoI)

·Efficiency

·Governance

·Impact

Expenditure and ROI: CAPS continued to function within the agreed budget for the year and no additional staffing resource or non-pay budget was requested.

The cost-effectiveness of CAPS can be demonstrated by the return on investment through student retention offsetting the expense of student attrition for the university.CAPShelps to protect tuition revenue by supporting students to remain on their course.

“It saved my life, in the traditional sense and also in that it has equipped me with the mental security to feel confident facing future challenges.”

Service evaluation data shows that around 10% of respondents would have definitely withdrawn without CAPS’ support. Using conservative assumptions, this equates to approximately 20–35 students retained annually. At Warwick fee levels, using blended home and international fee estimates, this represents significant protected tuition fee revenue. When accommodation income is included, the financial impact of student attrition is significantly higher than tuition alone, meaning the counselling service likely reaches cost neutrality at a much lower retention threshold.In summary, as a modest assumption calculation, if CAPS prevents the withdrawal of just 25–30 students per year, this is sufficient for the therapy service to pay for itself meaning CAPS is salary cost neutral.

Efficiency: Despite the increase in referrals to CAPS by 12% from the previous year, CAPS decreased the overall wait time for therapy by ~14% through effective streamlining processes.

Risk Management: Challenges such as the increased risk profile and the severity in the issues presented were managed through CAPS’ redesign of our risk referral process and adoption of a rigorous disengagement check procedure.All CAPS staff completed safeguarding and Prevent training.

Governance Assurance: CAPS was awarded the Professional Service Accreditation status again this year with the UK’s leading professional body for counsellors and psychotherapists, the BACP; this is a kitemark of quality assurance covering all areas of the provision.CAPS continues to engage with external consultative clinical supervision for all staff.All core CAPS staff are required to maintain individual professional accreditation status in order to practice to deliver quality therapy.CAPS also broadly aligns with the UMHAN Clinical Governance Framework to consolidate good working practices and standards.

KPIs: CAPS continues to successfully achieve its KPIs as assurance of its standards of operational performance (including responsiveness and capacity management) and effectiveness.See Appendix 1.

“I feel confident enough to take on the world after university”

University Strategic alignment: CAPS carried out a team activity to ensure the service aligned with the 5 key priorities.See Appendix 2.CAPS also continues to support the development work of the Warwick Wellbeing Strategy.

Impact: CAPS continues to evidence outstanding satisfaction and meaningful outcomes for students.Of those who returned feedback, 92% reported that therapy helped them to stay at university; 94% said therapy helped them to manage their academic work; 97% indicated therapy improved their overall experience of university.

2.3 Executive Summary for Student Community demonstrating

·Accessibility

·Range of therapy services offered

·Impact for students

·Usage

“The therapy sessions have been good for processing past experiences and finding ways to cope and overcome current feelings and emotional states.”

Accessibility: The Counselling and Psychological Services (CAPS) is designed to be highly accessible and responsive to student need.

Annual focus group feedback highlights that:

“Most students described the referral process as straightforward and easy to navigate,” valuing both the clarity of the process and the responsiveness of the service.

Students can access CAPS following a brief consultation with a Wellbeing Practitioner and completion of a short referral form, ensuring appropriate and timely allocation to therapy.

In comparison to local NHS psychological therapy services—where waiting times can exceed 18 months—CAPS provides rapid access, with average waiting times of approximately three weeks.

Accessibility is further enhanced through:

Evening appointments offered twice weekly during term time
Year-round provision, including targeted summer support (e.g. postgraduate group pilot)

CAPS recognises increasing student expectations for on-demand support. However, the service maintains a clinically informed balance, ensuring timely access while supporting the development of long-term resilience and self-management, in line with its educational mission.

Range of therapy services offered to students:

CAPS provides a diverse and flexible therapeutic offer to meet the needs of a heterogeneous student population:

One-to-one therapy (most utilised), delivered:

In person
Online (via Microsoft Teams)
Or through blended formats

Group therapy programmes (growing demand), offering:

Structured therapeutic interventions
Emotional processing and shared experience
Application of evidence-based techniques to support psychological change

(Distinct from psychoeducational workshops)

Asynchronous email counselling, particularly valued by:

Students who prefer reflective, written communication
International students or those for whom English is not a first language

This multi-modal approach ensures inclusive access across preferences, needs, and cultural contexts.

Impact for students

“A big and genuine thank you to my therapist….I believe you give me a gift that goes beyond the meaning of education and will impact my life in the future”.

CAPS demonstrates strong, evidence-based impact on student outcomes using the sector-recognised Clinical Impact on Academic Outcome (CIAO) measure:

92% reported therapy helped them remain at university
94% reported improved ability to manage academic work
97% reported an enhanced overall university experience

Student satisfaction is exceptionally high:

98% would recommend the service
99% reported being satisfied or very satisfied (82% very satisfied; 17% satisfied)

These outcomes indicate that CAPS plays a critical role in student retention, academic success, and overall wellbeing.

“I was completely in the headspace of dropping out and giving up a lot of things I'd worked hard to achieve because I really was unable to manage my grief. Through my sessions not only have I found methods to use in my day to day to help me process and manage those feelings, but I've also been able to look at myself past my grief and looked at healthy changes I can make daily to help me complete my degree and do so feeling more like myself again”.

Usage headlines

Demand for CAPS remains consistently high, reflecting both need and trust in the service:

~11,000 appointments delivered annually
2,068 students referred for therapy over the year
Peak demand observed in Week 9, Term 1, with 76 new referrals in a single week

These figures demonstrate that CAPS is a high-utilisation service operating at scale, supporting a significant proportion of the student population.

In summary, CAPS is a highly accessible, high-impact service supporting over 2,000 students annually, with strong evidence of improving retention, academic outcomes, and student experience.

“It has had a huge impact on my overall mental and emotional health. This was through learning how to regulate my emotions as well as rationalize them to have a better mindset on my anxieties that made me feel stuck in life. Overall truly worth it and transformed my well-being.”

***

9.0 Feedback and Outcomes

CAPS places strong emphasis on the continuous collection and use of feedback within its individual therapy services. To support this, we utilise a well-established feedback form that includes a section specifically developed for the Higher Education sector, known as CIAO (Clinical Impact on Academic Outcomes), alongside additional evaluative components (see Appendix 11 for the full feedback report).

Process: At the conclusion of a brief course of therapy, students are invited to complete an online questionnaire reflecting on their experience with CAPS. The questionnaire is structured into three sections:

Overall feedback
Impact and effectiveness
Feedback for the therapist

This feedback tool serves a dual purpose: it provides insight into overall service efficacy while also supporting the monitoring and development of individual therapists.

During the 2024–25 academic year, 350 completed questionnaires were received, representing a 20% response rate.NB this feedback is for individual work, group feedback is presented separately in the Group Therapy report (Appendix 6).

Encouragingly, feedback from service users has been consistently and overwhelmingly positive across all areas. Standout feedback includes:

·An overwhelming majority of students would recommend the services to others (99%)

·Students reported very high overall levels of satisfaction (99%)

·83% of students found the frequency of their therapy appointments to work well

·85% of students reported that the number of therapy sessions met their need

·82% of respondents credit therapy with helping them continue at university to some degree.

·~ 75% of respondents reported that therapy played a meaningful role in supporting them to manage and engage more effectively with their academic work despite academic concerns not typically being the primary presenting issue.

·Therapy appears to play a central role in enhancing students’ overall university experience, with over 85% acknowledging a positive impact

·three out of four respondents credit therapy with helping them build employment-related skills, such as confidence, communication, or emotional regulation

·The majority of students (nearly 75%) identified it as a meaningful part of their skill development for future careers.

·Therapy has had a strong and widely felt positive impact on general wellbeing.Nearly 9 in 10 reported some level of improvement, with over half experiencing significant improvement, reinforcing the value of therapy

·Nearly 9 in 10 respondents reported that therapy improved their general mood: This supports the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions in enhancing emotional wellbeing at university

·Therapy appears to play a valuable role in enhancing empathy and social insight. More than 4 in 5 students reported that it improved their ability to understand others, which may contribute to better relationships and group dynamics in both academic and personal contexts.

·Therapy appears to have a strong and beneficial effect on students’ self-esteem, with nearly 9 in10 reporting a positive change.

·Therapy has had a profoundly positive effect on students’ emotional regulation. With nearly 90% reporting improvement, and more than half experiencing significant gains, this data strongly supports the effectiveness of therapy in helping students manage emotional challenges—an essential part of mental health and academic success.

In addition, CAPS collaborates closely with the University Marketing Team, who facilitate annual student focus groups to inform ongoing service development and enhancement (see Appendix 12 for the focus group report). While feedback regarding experiences of CAPS therapy was overwhelmingly positive, the process also identified valuable areas for improvement and refinement.

For example, findings suggested that some students conflated “wellbeing support” with “therapy”. In response, CAPS shared the relevant findings with Wellbeing Managers to help ensure clearer communication and earlier clarification of pathways for students accessing support. Participants also provided constructive feedback regarding the CAPS webpages and online information, and recommendations arising from the focus group have been submitted to IDG for consideration within future digital development planning.

This year, participants were additionally invited to discuss the potential role of AI within student support services. Students expressed notably strong and consistent views on this issue. The University Marketing Team produced a separate summary document in alignment with the wider university project examining the use of AI across services (see Appendix 13).

The report summary concluded:

“All students strongly opposed the idea of AI in front-line service delivery. Students were clear and firm that no AI system could offer the emotional depth, empathy, connection or human presence that therapy requires.”

These findings reinforce the importance students place on relational, human-centred therapeutic support and underline the continuing value of embedded, professionally delivered counselling services within the university environment.

10.0 Trends, Challenges and Opportunities Ahead

Despite securing consistently strong positive feedback—which affirms the strengths and qualities of a highly functioning team of qualified and motivated therapists operating within a thriving service at a prestigious university—there remain a number of ongoing challenges, alongside important opportunities for development.

10.1 Emerging Sector Trends and Associated Challenges

Across the higher education sector, a number of wider systemic trends continue to shape the context within which CAPS operates:

Demand for Immediate Accessibility
Trend: Students increasingly expect rapid, on-demand support comparable to commercial digital services.
Challenge: Balancing expectations for immediacy with the need for clinically appropriate, relational, and ethically grounded therapeutic work.
Institutional Pressure to Respond to ‘Customers’
Trend: The marketisation of higher education continues to influence expectations of university support services.
Challenge: Maintaining clinical integrity and professional boundaries whilst responding to institutional pressures linked to satisfaction metrics and student experience agendas.
Changing Expectations of Students and Parents
Trend: Increased parental involvement and heightened expectations regarding student wellbeing and outcomes.
Challenge: Navigating issues of confidentiality, autonomy, and occasionally unrealistic expectations regarding therapeutic intervention and risk management.
Changing Attitudes Towards Mental Health
Trend: Reduced stigma has encouraged greater openness around mental health difficulties, alongside a growing tendency to pathologise normative emotional distress.
Challenge: Managing increasing demand whilst continuing to promote resilience, self-agency, and psychologically informed coping strategies.
Post-COVID Mental Health Presentations
Trend: Sustained increases in anxiety, social isolation, emotional dysregulation, and trauma-related presentations following the pandemic.
Challenge: Responding to enduring complexity in student mental health needs alongside continued pressure on service capacity.
Use of Generative AI Tools in Therapy and Student Support
Opportunities: AI technologies may support triage processes, psychoeducation, self-help interventions, and administrative efficiency.
Challenges: Ethical considerations relating to confidentiality, data privacy, clinical governance, and the potential depersonalisation of therapeutic support require careful evaluation.

10.2 Strategic Challenges and Opportunities for 2025–26

Whilst many of the challenges outlined sit beyond CAPS’ direct sphere of influence, there remain clear opportunities for proactive adaptation and service development. Alongside responding to external pressures, several internal improvements can be progressed throughout 2025–26.

Strategic Challenge	Opportunity	Strategic CAPS Response (2025–26)
Volatile global and national climate impacting student resilience	Strengthen preventative and resilience-based approaches	Develop a therapeutic group focused on resilience-building, emotional regulation, and coping strategies
Sector-wide budgetary constraints	Maximise efficiency and demonstrate value	Use outcome measures and service data (e.g. CIAO) to evidence impact, support business cases for resource, and review staff contract patterns where appropriate
Rapid technological advancement, including AI	Shape ethical and effective use of technology	Explore appropriate digital and AI-supported interventions and modernise website information and self-help resources
Increasing stakeholder expectations	Improve communication and transparency	Clarify service scope, thresholds, and pathways for students, staff, parents, and external stakeholders
Reduced NHS resource and longer external waiting times	Strengthen internal and external partnerships	Enhance collaboration with university services and external providers to improve continuity of care and referral pathways
Rising complexity and risk in student presentations	Continue developing flexible and robust responses to risk	Embed consistent service-wide risk management protocols and enhance staff training in complex risk assessment and management
Growing demand and longer waiting times	Continue innovating service delivery models	Maintain robust systems for managing appointment flow; explore alternative referral pathways, self-booking systems, and OAAT (One at a Time) approaches (see Appendix 14)
Lack of strategic clarity across the evolving service landscape	Define and align future direction	Establish a clear CAPS strategic plan aligned with institutional priorities, sector developments, and emerging student need

10.3 Core Contemporary Challenges in University Counselling – supporting the value of quality, integration and embeddedness in a modern university.

Q1. Isn’t a counselling service a luxury a university can no longer afford?

No — counselling is an essential component of a successful university ecosystem.

An embedded counselling service contributes directly to student retention, continuation, and academic success, meaning its financial impact is often cost-neutral or cost-saving when attrition is considered. Students who disengage from study due to mental health difficulties represent significant human and financial costs to institutions.

Beyond economics, counselling services support the wider mission and values of the university. Universities are not simply knowledge providers; they are communities shaping future citizens, professionals, researchers, and leaders. Supporting students’ psychological wellbeing is therefore integral to the educational experience, not peripheral to it.

Evidence consistently demonstrates that students engaging with counselling services experience:

improved academic engagement and attainment
increased likelihood of course completion
enhanced wellbeing and resilience
a stronger sense of belonging and connection to university life

A high-quality counselling service is therefore not an optional luxury, but part of the infrastructure that enables students to thrive.

Q2. Students want 24/7 support accessible on demand, so shouldn’t universities provide this?

Not necessarily — accessibility must be balanced with developmental, clinical, and practical considerations.

While students increasingly expect instant access to support, universities also have a responsibility to promote autonomy, resilience, and sustainable help-seeking behaviours. Higher education is partly a developmental environment in which students learn to tolerate difficulty, manage distress, and engage appropriately with support systems.

Providing continuous, on-demand counselling risks unintentionally reinforcing expectations of immediate emotional resolution rather than fostering longer-term coping skills and independence.

It is also important to distinguish between:

therapeutic counselling,
emotional listening services,
and crisis intervention.

These are different forms of support requiring different infrastructures.

For out-of-hours emotional support, students already have access to services such as:

Samaritans
NHS urgent mental health pathways
community crisis services
emergency care systems

In acute or high-risk situations, these services are generally more appropriate and clinically equipped than university counselling teams.

There is also a question of quality. Effective counselling depends on thoughtful, relational, and ethically sustained practice. A model built around permanent availability may compromise continuity, reflection, and professional standards. Scheduled, well-structured therapeutic support often leads to better outcomes than reactive, fragmented contact.

The goal should therefore not be limitless access, but a coherent ecosystem of support in which university counselling plays a defined and effective role.

Q3. Should counselling be outsourced so capacity can flex according to demand?

Flexibility matters, but fully outsourcing counselling risks weakening the quality and integration of student support.

Embedded university counsellors possess specialist understanding of:

academic pressures and institutional culture
student developmental transitions
safeguarding and fitness-to-study processes
university systems, departments, and referral pathways

This contextual knowledge allows counselling to function as part of a broader network of student wellbeing and academic support rather than as an isolated clinical transaction.

External providers may offer scalability, but they often lack continuity, institutional understanding, and relationship-based collaboration with university staff. This can result in support that feels fragmented, impersonal, or disconnected from the student’s lived university experience.

There are also significant considerations regarding:

confidentiality and data governance
risk management and emergency response
quality assurance and clinical oversight
continuity of care and institutional accountability

A fully outsourced model may create efficiencies on paper while eroding trust, consistency, and campus connection in practice.

This does not mean external partnerships have no role. Supplementary provision can be useful but these approaches work best when they complement — rather than replace — a strong embedded counselling service.

Sustainable resource management is ultimately achieved not through distancing support from the institution, but through investing in integrated, relational, and contextually informed services that students can trust.

11.0 Looking Forward

As CAPS moves into its 40th year, having evolved through a range of iterations and sector changes, it is fitting to reflect on the significant developments across the past four decades. Throughout this time, CAPS has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to adapt thoughtfully and effectively in response to the changing landscape of higher education, particularly in relation to the growing complexity of student emotional wellbeing and mental health needs (see Appendix 15 for a brief narrative history of the service).

As the service enters its fifth decade, CAPS does so with confidence, creativity, and enthusiasm for the challenges ahead. The higher education environment will undoubtedly continue to evolve, bringing new expectations, technologies, and pressures. However, amid this change, there remain core principles that are fundamental to safe, ethical, and effective therapeutic practice, and which should continue to guide the service into the future.

These include:

ethical, reflective, and clinically thoughtful practice
robust clinical governance, including regular expert consultative supervision
commitment to the core therapeutic conditions, including empathy alongside appropriate therapeutic challenge
flexibility in responding to the differing needs of students at particular moments in their lives
positive and proportionate risk management that respects student autonomy wherever reasonably possible
ongoing continuing professional development for therapists and practitioners

Alongside this, CAPS should remain mindful of pressures that risk diluting the integrity and effectiveness of therapeutic work. In particular, the service should resist:

the dilution of evidence-based therapeutic practice in favour of purely transactional or volume-driven models
reactive responses to “customerised” expectations that may not align with sound developmental or clinical principles
excessively risk-averse approaches that inadvertently undermine student autonomy, resilience, and responsibility for self-care

The enduring strength of CAPS has been its ability to evolve without losing sight of its therapeutic foundations. Maintaining this balance between adaptation and integrity will remain essential as the service continues to support future generations of Warwick students.Top of Form