What is it?
- Service offing art therapy to schools in NCL.
- Individual or group art therapy for SEN & SEMH needs.
- On-site trainees work with school staff to minimise disruption.
Here's more detail
Description
Children and young people’s art therapy service based in schools as part of the Integrated Schools Service (ISS) in North Central London (NCL).
What will this involve?
Creative Art Therapy Service (CATS) offers art therapy to schools throughout NCL. Art therapy supports children and young people’s emotional wellbeing and improved engagement in school.
CATS workers can offer individual or group art therapy for a range of needs and issues for pupils at the stakeholder schools. Art therapy groups can also be facilitated to support children’s peer relationships.
Therapists will be based at the school for the day so children do not need to leave school to attend therapy. Referrals will then be considered in line with CATS referral criteria, by the panel made up of the ISS manager and lead art therapist. The therapists, with the support of the lead, will then work with the school’s senior leadership team (SLT) and teaching staff to find the best times for children to attend therapy with minimal disruption to their education.
CATS may be particularly suitable for schools who have young people who do not meet CAMHS thresholds and/or have neurodiversity and find talking therapies less accessible.
Who works in the team?
CATS therapy is facilitated by art psychotherapy trainees from the University of Hertfordshire. They are managed and clinically supervised by the lead art therapist.
Schools also have liaison work with the lead art therapist and the service lead for Integrated Schools at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Both of these staff have many years’ experience working therapeutically with schools around special educational needs (SEN) and social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs in various different capacities such as senior leadership, consultancy, therapy and training.
What is Art Therapy?
Art therapy is a form of psychological therapy that uses physical art materials and art making as its primary means of communication.
The art therapist supports the child to reflect on their art making as a way to help the child understand themselves. Art therapists have statutory regulation under the Health & Care Professionals Council.
Art therapy aims to:
- Support the young person to tolerate failure and uncertainty through the act of reflective art making.
- Gently increase the young person’s capacity for reflection by thinking with the therapist about the artwork the child has made.
- In doing so, this can Improve the young person’s emotional resilience and self–awareness more broadly throughout their life.
- Art therapy is a physical and sensory activity working on multiple communicative levels, e.g., visual, tactile, kinaesthetic and more. Sensory engagement can be effective in regulation of emotions.
- There is a growing evidence base that art therapy supports children to through their education, helping with emotional regulation, concentration and relationships with staff and peers.
Referral information
CATS can be purchased by the school directly and operates with school term times. Referrals for individual children in a school cannot be made, but the school can purchase a day (or more) of art therapy so the trainee will be onsite.
The service itself needs to be sold rather than having a pre-existing block contract giving open access to young people in NCL.
Contact information
Address: The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, Tavistock Clinic, 120 Belsize Lane, London NW3 5BA
General enquiries: CATS@tavi-port.nhs.uk.
Useful links
Recommended by Creative Art Therapy Service (CATS)
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