Art Therapy Training for Teachers: What to Look For (and What to Avoid)
You have probably typed something like "art therapy course for teachers" into a search engine and come away more confused than when you started.
On one side, you find £19 online diplomas promising to make you a certified art therapist in an afternoon. On the other, two-year postgraduate Masters programmes at universities that cost £15,000 and require clinical placements.
Neither is what you are looking for.
You are a teacher, teaching assistant, SENCO, or pastoral lead. You see children every day who cannot find words for what they are carrying. You have watched a child who refuses to talk pick up a pencil and draw something that tells you more than a month of conversations. You know, instinctively, that there is something in creative work that reaches children differently. And you want to know how to use that properly — not as a distraction activity at the end of the day, but as a structured, intentional way to help.
That course exists. But before you find it, you need to understand what you are actually looking for, and why most of what you will encounter online is not it.
Why Teachers Are Searching for This Right Now
The demand for this kind of training has not appeared from nowhere.
CAMHS waiting lists in England are now routinely running at twelve to eighteen months for children with significant anxiety. Meanwhile, the children are in your classroom today. They are in the medical room with stomach aches that have no physical cause. They are refusing to come in. They are sitting at the back, completely shut down, not learning anything, not being reached by anything you try.
You are not a therapist. You were never trained to be. And yet, by default, you are on the front line of a children's mental health crisis that the clinical services cannot keep up with.
It is not surprising that teachers are searching for something that gives them real tools — not more awareness training, not another poster about feelings, but something practical that actually helps a child regulate when their nervous system is flooded.
Art-based approaches are one of the most powerful tools available in a school setting precisely because they do not require a child to put difficult feelings into words. For many children, especially those who are anxious, neurodiverse, or carrying trauma, words are the hardest part. Creative expression bypasses that barrier.
But using art therapeutically is different from doing art. And understanding that difference is where most teachers get lost.
What "Art Therapy" Actually Means — and Why It Matters
In the UK, "art therapist" and "art psychotherapist" are protected titles. That means it is a legal requirement to hold a Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) registered postgraduate qualification before you can use them. The training takes two years full time, involves supervised clinical placements, and qualifies practitioners to work with complex mental health presentations including trauma, psychosis, and significant psychiatric conditions.
This is important work, carried out by highly trained people. It is also completely different from what most teachers need.
You are not trying to provide psychological treatment. You are trying to give anxious children a safe, structured way to express what they cannot say, to regulate their nervous systems, and to feel more settled in school. That is a different role, carried out in a different context, with different boundaries — and it does not require a clinical qualification to do it well.
What it does require is proper training in how to use creative processes therapeutically. That is what the term therapeutic art practitioner describes. And that is what a good training course will give you.
The Problem With Most Online Art Therapy Courses
When you search for art therapy training online, the majority of what you find falls into one of three categories.
The cheap certificate mills. These are £19 to £99 CPD bundles — often sold through Reed or Udemy — that bundle together several short courses, give you a downloadable certificate, and teach you very little of practical use. They are not regulated, not clinically grounded, and will not give you the tools to actually sit with an anxious child and help them. They are knowledge-based in the loosest sense, which means they describe what art therapy is without teaching you how to do anything with it.
The postgraduate clinical routes. MA Art Therapy at Goldsmiths, Derby, Hertfordshire, and a handful of other universities will genuinely train you as an art therapist. But they are designed for people entering a clinical profession. They are expensive, they require clinical placements, they take two to three years, and they qualify you to practise in NHS and specialist settings. If that is your ambition, they are the right path. But if you are a TA wanting practical tools for Year 5, they are not what you need.
The creative wellbeing workshops. These are often lovely — a day exploring drawing or collage, perhaps with some discussion about emotional wellbeing. They are enjoyable and sometimes illuminating. But they are not training. You leave knowing you had a nice experience, not knowing how to replicate it with a dysregulated eight-year-old on a Wednesday afternoon.
The gap between all of these — the proper, accessible, practically focused practitioner training that equips school staff to use art therapeutically and safely — is where the real need is. And until recently, it was almost entirely unmet.
What Good Therapeutic Art Training for Schools Actually Looks Like
If you are evaluating a course, here is what to look for.
It should be built around anxiety, not just creativity. Most therapeutic art courses teach a collection of activities. A good course teaches you why those activities work — what is happening in the nervous system when a child draws their fear as a colour, or builds a visual safe place, or uses shape and symbol to externalise something overwhelming. Without that understanding, you are doing craft. With it, you are doing something genuinely therapeutic.
It should teach emotional regulation specifically. The goal in a school setting is almost always regulation — helping a child move from a state of overwhelm or shutdown into a calmer, more settled state where they can learn and connect. The creative techniques you use should serve that purpose directly. A course that talks vaguely about self-expression without grounding it in regulation practice is missing the point for a school context.
It should cover working with neurodiverse children. A significant proportion of the children who will benefit most from therapeutic art in schools are autistic, have ADHD, or are awaiting assessment. Any training worth its name should address how to adapt creative approaches for these children — including the use of social stories through art, which is one of the most powerful tools available for helping anxious and neurodiverse children prepare for situations that overwhelm them.
It should be accredited. Not with a £19 certificate from a CPD bundle, but with a recognised professional body. ACCPH (the Accredited Counsellors, Coaches, Psychotherapists and Hypnotherapists) and IPHM (the International Practitioners of Holistic Medicine) are two of the most credible accrediting bodies for therapeutic practitioner training in the UK. A certificate from either gives you professional standing and a basis for working with institutions.
It should be clear about scope. This matters enormously. You are not training to be a clinical therapist. A good course should teach you explicitly where the boundaries of your role are — what you can do, what you should refer on, and how to work safely within your competence. A course that blurs this distinction is not doing you or your pupils any favours.
It should give you a complete method, not a list of activities. There is a significant difference between a course that teaches you twenty art activities and a course that teaches you a structured, transferable method that you can adapt to different ages, settings, and needs. The former gives you a toolkit. The latter gives you a practice.
What You Can Actually Do in Schools After Training
This question matters, and it is worth being concrete about it.
A trained therapeutic art practitioner working in a school can run individual sessions with anxious children using structured creative techniques — drawing emotions as colour, building visual safe places, shape and symbol work, creative grounding exercises. They can run small group sessions focused on emotional literacy and regulation. They can use social stories through art to help neurodiverse children prepare for transitions, new situations, or anything that triggers anticipatory anxiety.
They cannot diagnose, treat mental health conditions, or provide clinical therapy. They work alongside, not instead of, clinical services. When a child's needs go beyond what a practitioner can safely hold, they know when and how to refer.
But the number of children in your school who need clinical therapy is smaller than the number who need someone to sit with them once a week, give them a structured creative space, and help them find language — visual or otherwise — for what they are carrying. That is work that a properly trained practitioner can do. And in the current climate, it may be the most important work happening in your building.
The STILL Art Practitioner Course
The STILL Art Practitioner course is built specifically for people in exactly this position — teachers, teaching assistants, SENCOs, pastoral leads, and support workers who want to use therapeutic art in schools without taking a clinical route.
It is built around the STILL Method's internationally recognised approach to anxiety. Every creative technique in the course is grounded in how anxiety works in the brain and body — which means the activities you learn are not just expressive, they are specifically designed to support emotional regulation and nervous system safety.
The course covers all eight modules of therapeutic art practice, including emotional regulation through art, social stories through art for neurodiverse and anxious children, working across ages and settings, ethics and scope of practice, and session design for both individual and group work. It is accredited by both ACCPH and IPHM.
You can train entirely self-paced online, or join two days of live training on Zoom — with over ten hours of additional recorded content included on both routes. Either way, you leave as a qualified STILL Art Practitioner with a recognised accreditation and a complete method you can begin using in your school straight away.
You do not need to be an artist. You do not need a background in therapy. You need the right training — and that is what this course provides.
