There's been an increased request for people to understand the difference between counselling and being a clinical psychologist.
You can be a counsellor/psychotherapist with around four years of study and without a degree. The cost is substantially less and you spend 75+ % of your time with clients giving therapy. Cost of becoming qualified is around £6/7000 for all tuition. Courses are part time so can work. Additional costs are supervision for 40-60 pcm unless subsidised. Personal therapy, registration to professional body (which can be less on low income) and sometimes insurance which is about £40 for the year. You probably could go from no knowledge of counselling to fully qualified for the equivalent cost of 1 year's uni tuition. (A huge saving when you factor in the maintainence loan now too).
In contrast to be a clinical psychologist, you need to complete an UG degree which for the lowest income costs £15k per year in loans. So 45 at graduation. Then the cost/loan of post graduate. Pushing to 50+ and 1 or two years of study. Then the dclinpsy. Which is funded but another 3 years of study. So you've spent 8-9 years to get into a career which sees you delivering therapy for about 50% of your time.
That's fine if that's what you want, of course. But you should have an understanding of the difference if you're choosing to get into over £50000 of debt when you could spend less than 10k and offset it by working throughout your studies. As a trainee counsellor, you also get a placement much quicker. You study for a year and a half (in most cases) and then you're delivering therapy as a trainee. You're generally unable to deliver therapy until years into your training towards clinical psychologist because you wouldn't meet the requirements to safely practice therapy.
You don't necessarily have to become an assistant psych to understand this but you should talk to a clinical psychologist about their job. Are you prepared to spend the other half of your time delivering supervision, investigating colleagues for complaints and potential malpractice, meet the requirements for assessments. It can be an isolating job just because you're senior in the team you work in, and it can be difficult to keep boundaries between yourself and colleagues when you're their supervisor (ie person who listens to their difficulties with clients and offers choices advice etc...as basic description), colleague and also the person which potentially investigates them.
If you don't speak to them, how can you really decide if you need to spend 5 times as much money to get where you want to be..in at least twice the time