Sarah Worley-James

Sarah Worley-James is a BACP Senior accredited counsellor, supervisor and trainer with 25 years’ experience in the public, private and third sectors. She is former chair of ACTO and Senior Counsellor at Cardiff University. She is a senior tutor at the Academy for Online Therapy and author of Online Counselling - an essential guide, out shortly by PCCS books

Sarah is passionate about online counselling, setting up the online service at Cardiff University in 2011 and contributing to the BACP’s initial response to the COVID 19 pandemic in 2020. She has had a regular column about online counselling, ‘Cyberwork’, in the BACP Workplace journal since 2016 and published a series of articles about the process of setting up an university online counselling service in the BACP AUCC journal in (2017).

Sarah’s counselling career began in the substance misuse field, where she first developed her teaching and supervision skills, training professionals in Motivational Interviewing and writing and teaching a BACP accredited counselling diploma. She has also worked in employee counselling for many years, including when she moved into higher education counselling in 2009, counselling staff and students. It was here that she first developed her passion for online counselling, noticing that few universities were offering this, whilst being convinced that students would benefit from the potential for online counselling to provide a safer and creative way to enter into therapy.