Program Overview

This full-time Masters-level Art Psychotherapy Practice course provides you with specialist training, qualifications, and opportunities to help you embark on a diverse and exciting career. Allowing study over a longer period which supports students with other responsibilities.

Learn directly from HCPC-registered art therapists, engaging with real-world practice throughout. Our staff integrates art-making into theory and experiential teaching.

All our courses are designed around a set of key principles based on engaging you with the world, collaborating with others, challenging you to think in new ways, and providing you with a supportive environment in which you can thrive.

The course is designed to promote a critical and proactive approach to learning, which will enable you to become an effective and autonomous practitioner. There is a mixed mode of experiential and theoretical learning and teaching adopted in this program. You are expected to engage fully in the learning process and in some of the modules you will learn with, from, and about students from other health and social care courses in the School of Health and Social Care as part of the integrated curricula. This approach will ensure you have strong roots in your chosen profession of art therapy.

This approach will ensure you have a strong identity as an art therapist but are also able to deliver person-centered care with an understanding of service integration and working within a multidisciplinary team to support the person's journey through health and care services.

The focus of the integrated curricula will prepare you for working in an integrated working environment with multidisciplinary teams and organizations working effectively together to enhance the quality of care to the service user. These attributes will enhance employability not only for graduate employment, but will support career progression to senior positions within the NHS, social care, third sector, education, and private organizations.  

A detailed induction program aims to facilitate students’ transition into studying at the master's level and introduces students to a range of support mechanisms to which they have access within the art therapy team and across the University.  

You will experience a blended approach to learning and teaching both on campus and in practice placements including:  

You learn through

• art-making in fully-equipped learning spaces
• a mix of individual and group sessions
• experiential creative groups
• workshops
• placements
• field trips where available, such as visits to talks and exhibitions
• practice-based learning

Alongside art-making you’ll learn about client-centred approaches in psychotherapy – enabling you to use models to adapt to different service settings. You’ll experience an integrated placement, which runs throughout the course. You’ll also have access to our unique student support triangle to help with your personal, academic, and career development.