About

Quality Assurance and IRCEP

The education and training of counsellors varies greatly across the world, ranging from certification to graduate-level education. Some countries have quality assurance systems in the form of government regulations or independent accreditation requirements where other countries have neither training standards, accreditation systems nor other mechanisms to determine the quality of educational programs. As a result, the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) received a growing number of requests from counsellor education programs outside the United States for review and recognition. Recognizing that the CACREP Standards are based on the culture, educational system, and regulations in the United State, CACREP created IRCEP to develop standards that would cross cultures. As an international quality assurance agency, IRCEP was purposefully designed to recognize and empower programs for developing counsellor-training curricula appropriate to their country, region and/or culture, while also recognizing the broad tenets of education and training common to the practice of counselling, regardless of location.