Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQs) about the MACC Programme

1. How long is the course?

The MACC Programme is a 2-year, full-time training programme that includes an M1 (first year) of formal course work and application, as well as the completion of a research report of limited scope. The M2 (second year) is comprised of a 12-month, approved internship. At present, a community service year is not required as part of the training and post-training obligations of candidates. This means that all candidates should complete and qualify as psychologists after 2 years.

2. What is my registration category with the Professional Board of Psychology (PBP) and the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA)?

Upon satisfactory completion of both the M1 and M2 years, as well as the successful completion of the Board Examination, candidates are registerable with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) and the Professional Board of Psychology (PBP) as a Counselling Psychologist. While the programme therefore has an integrated community psychology component to it, it also focuses on the professional training of Counselling Psychologists. Given that there are a limited number of professional registration categories, students do not register as Community Psychologists, but rather as Counselling Psychologists. Obviously in practice, we envisage that Counselling Psychologists emerging from this programme will have a strong orientation to working in and with communities as well.

3. What will my registration as a Counselling Psychologist facilitate in terms of future work prospects?

The Professional Board of Psychology broadly stipulates that Counselling Psychologists assist relatively well-adjusted people in dealing with normal problems of life concerning all stages and aspects of a person's existence in order to facilitate desirable psychological adjustment, growth, and maturity. With this scope of practice in mind, it is apparent that Counselling Psychologists can find themselves providing assistance to individuals, families, groups, and communities. Indeed, many of our past students find themselves in academia, private practice, community-based organisations, the development and humanitarian sectors, the public sector (government), employee wellness positions in corporates, etc. The range of possible work places and spaces to occupy are extremely varied, and this is partly what the training programme aims to facilitate - a multi-skilled researcher-practitioner who can respond optimally in and across a range of contexts, with a range of problems, amongst a range of diverse people.

4. How is the MACC programme innovatively different from other professional training programmes?

Firstly, it integrates traditional clinical training modules such as assessment, psychopathology and psychotherapy with a strong focus and orientation to community psychology. Each of these four areas are equally weighted within the programme, so as to emphasise the importance of community contexts in all psychological practice. This is quite different to other programmes, where community psychology is often a peripheral "add-on". Our approach therefore allows for a more integrated, socially relevant and diverse skills set that can be appropriately deployed for psychotherapeutic and broad-based community interventions.

Secondly, the MACC programme engages with traditional modules of training, but has the added value of looking at these clinical components through a more critical lens that accommodates for the influence of contextual factors. Not only do candidates therefore gain knowledge, exposure and expertise in the core clinical elements required to function as a psychologist, but also engage with this material in more critical ways.

Thirdly, at the level of developmental theory and psychotherapeutic theory and practice, the MACC programme adopts an integrative model. This model incorporates a focus on multiple theoretical paradigms to account for psychological problems, and similarly, focuses on multiple modalities to intervene psychotherapeutically. Unlike many other training programmes where the focus is purely psychodynamic, CBT, or existential for example, the MACC programme covers all of these modalities as well as more applied ways of working, through a focus on systemic applications to couples, families and groups as well.

Finally, while many other training programmes are embedded in a practitioner model, the MACC programme is premised on a researcher-practitioner model, that again opens up the choice for candidates to engage in more traditional therapeutic ways and/or in more critical community-based forms.

In general, the MACC programme is designed to develop psychologists who can straddle traditional modes of functioning as therapists, as well as more critical and socially conscious modes of functioning that are normally ascribed to critical, social and community psychology.