The mark of trusted counselling
Every member is admitted against criteria published in full, works within a defined scope of practice and remains in supervision for as long as they practise.
Start here
How to choose support safely: what a HICS counsellor is trained to help with, and what they will refer to another professional.
If you or someone else is in immediate danger, contact emergency services. HICS is not an emergency service and cannot respond to a crisis.
For an employer, a school, an NGO, an employee assistance programme or a GP: what a designation rests on, what the member is held to, and what it does not authorise.
Membership requires a recognised qualification, 200 hours of supervised practice, continuing supervision for as long as you practise, and annual professional development, the core of it included in the fee.
Training is recognised by published standard, never by provider. Any provider may apply, and every application is assessed against the same criteria.
What a designation means
The word “counsellor” is not reserved under the Health Professions Act, so anyone may use it, and on its own it guarantees nothing about a person’s training, their experience or their ethical conduct. A HICS designation is a way of showing, and of checking, that someone works to a defined standard.
Membership requires a qualification at NQF level 7 or above in psychology, social work or a counselling field, and a counselling programme recognised against a published standard. Every programme and supervised hour must be confirmed with the provider or supervisor who can vouch for it, and every qualification from a certified certificate and transcript, which HICS may check with the awarding institution where a document is unclear. What an applicant states is where assessment starts, not where it finishes.
200 hours of practical experience is required before admission, each hour signed off by an approved supervisor. Where 100 hours is a common benchmark in this field, HICS requires twice that, because competence in counselling is built by practising under supervision, not by study alone.
Supervision is not a training requirement that ends at admission, and it must be verified at each annual renewal. A member whose supervision lapses may not see clients under a HICS designation until it is restored.
One published scope sets what every member is competent to do, what none of them may ever do, and when a member must refer a client on rather than take them on. It is the same document for a client, an employer and a referring professional, so all three can see exactly where a member’s remit ends.
Continuing professional development is required every year. HICS includes the core of it, its own standards content and the ethics minimum, in the membership fee; the rest a member earns from courses HICS has accredited or from recognised activities. A member pays the provider for a course, and pays HICS nothing to have accredited points counted.
Any person may complain about a member, whether or not they were that member’s client. A complaint is decided by an impartial panel that explains its decision in writing, with a right of appeal, and a member found in breach can face conditions on their practice, suspension or removal. A membership that cannot be lost is a subscription, not a standard.
Humanitas Independent Counselling Society membership designation. Not a statutory registration.
Limitations of practice
Most professional bodies tell you what their members can do. The more useful thing, for a client deciding whether to trust someone, for a psychologist weighing a referral, and for an employer deciding what a role can contain, is to be exact about where members’ competence ends.
Six of the ten limitations. No member of HICS may:
Where a client’s needs go beyond this scope, a member has a positive duty to refer. Not permission to refer, a duty.
Why HICS exists
Anyone may practise counselling without joining a register, holding a protected title or completing any minimum training.
The cost of that falls on the people least equipped to carry it. A client cannot tell three years of training from a weekend workshop. An employer can verify an applicant who holds a statutory registration, but not a counsellor who does not. A psychologist has no reliable way to confirm an unregistered counsellor’s training or standing before referring a client on. And the many careful, well-trained counsellors working in schools, clinics, NGOs, workplaces and private practice have had no way to demonstrate the difference.
HICS exists to close that gap.
If you have concerns about a member
If a member has behaved in a way that troubles you, say so. You do not need to have been their client, and you do not need to be certain a rule was broken.
What HICS is
HICS publishes standards, admits members against them, maintains a directory where standing can be checked and enforces a code of conduct. It is not a training provider, it does not sell courses, and it holds no statutory authority.
HICS is a registered non-profit company (registration number 2026/694642/08).
HICS is a voluntary, non-statutory membership body. Membership is not a legal requirement to practise, confers no statutory authority, and is not equivalent to registration with the Health Professions Council of South Africa.
HICS was founded by Anri van den Berg, who also owns Humanitas Training, a counselling training provider whose programmes HICS recognises. That relationship is set out in full, along with the rules that govern it.
Our relationship with Humanitas TrainingHow training is recognised, and by whom