Creative Arts Therapist

Job Title: Art Therapist, Music Therapist, Drama Therapist or Play Therapist

Job Location: Acorn School, Winkleigh (EX19)

Salary: Between £32,428.93 and £35,428.93, based on working part time (32 hours), 4 days per week, 42 weeks per year

Contract Type: Permanent – Term Time Only

As a Therapist, what does a typical week look like for you? With us, your day would start with a morning briefing, where you'll share updates and hear about the impactful work being done throughout our Integrated Therapy team.

You'll play an active role in delivering training sessions to our teaching teams, exploring creative activities that enhance learning, and sharing invaluable insights from pupils. You’ll also lead reflective sessions with team members, encouraging and assisting them to express their thoughts and feelings, and potentially discuss their learning experiences. Helping our pupils to have a sense of ownership in their learning journey, making them an integral part of the process.

Your creativity and expertise will shine as you design therapeutic sessions to help our pupils express their emotions in healthy and constructive ways. These sessions will have a lasting impact, especially for neurodiverse pupils or those who have experienced trauma, providing them with meaningful outlets when words aren’t enough.

You'll support a small caseload, offering 1:1 or group sessions to best meet the needs of the children. You'll also have protected time to develop your own clinical and mentoring skills, along with receiving regular clinical supervision.

A day in the life of a Therapist will involve:

• Taking a Neurodiverse affirming and trauma-informed approach to clinical work you’ll work with a small caseload of pupils with neurodiverse needs. You can do this through 1:1 support, classroom work and group sessions.
• Assessing, planning, implementing, and evaluating individual and group psychological or creative arts therapy sessions.
• Working alongside Speech and Language Therapists and other Creative Art Therapists.
• Training and mentoring your education colleagues on best practice and effective ways to support the pupils within the school. You may do this by designing classroom strategies, running reflective practice sessions, or delivering training directly to teachers and learning support assistants or teaching assistants.
• Administration. Whilst doing all your great work with the pupils, we’ll need you to keep their records up to date and carry out all the administrative tasks you’d expect to come with this role.
• Attending monthly Psychological Services team meetings and quarterly Integrated Therapies Team meetings.

To be a successful Therapist, you’ll need:

• A recognised Post Graduate qualification in Art Therapy/Music Therapy or Drama Therapy along with HCPC Registration.
• Great experience working as a Creative Arts Therapist.
• The desire and confidence to run supervisions and offer training and support to other Psychological Therapists.
• Good IT skills – We’ll train you on how to use our systems, but it would help if you had a working understanding of using Microsoft packages like Excel, Word, Outlook and Teams.
• A full driving licence. Whilst this role is based in a single location, travel to other sites will be required at times including travel to our Tiverton Hub for team meetings and training where required.

In return for your time, you’ll get:

• Holidays – You’ll get 28 days annual leave, including public holidays (You’ll get a Pro Rata amount based on your hours and contract length). You’ll also get an extra day off on your birthday after a year
• Pension scheme– Our pension scheme is based on you paying in 5%, and us adding 3%.
• Learning & Development Opportunities – We provide comprehensive learning opportunities for team members to develop themselves.
• Discounts – You’ll have access to brilliant discounts through the Blue Light Card and our own employee benefits platform.
• Wellbeing Support – Your wellbeing is always our priority. You’ll have access to mental health and wellbeing support. On top of this, our therapies team offers a monthly confidential check in clinic, and group reflective practice sessions.
• Cycle2Work -The cycle to work scheme enables you to buy a bicycle at a discounted rate.
• DBS – As this role required you to have an enhanced DBS carried out, we will cover this cost.

After 12 months service you’ll also be eligible for our Medicash scheme which covers a wide range of medical, health and wellbeing expenses (Including immediate access to a GP). You’ll get life assurance paid at x2 your annual salary.

Please note that as part of our safer recruitment processes, successful applicants will be subject to pre-employment checks including an enhanced disclosure and barring service (DBS) check, and online and social media checks, and reference validation.

At Phoenix Learning and Care, we pride ourselves on our diverse workforce, and ensuring we have an inclusive environment for all our team members. We remain committed to ensuring our teams can bring their true selves to work without risk or fear of discrimination.