The Association for Psychological Therapies' top 10 most ordered courses over the past 3 months (training that people have commissioned to be delivered exclusively for their team, either face-to-face or live online).*
*Updated July 2025.
A 1-day course. (12-hour 'online anytime' self-paced version also available.)
All clinicians want to provide patients with the maximum benefit, but many are acutely aware that while they are providing one person with the best they can offer, they are providing ten or more others with nothing at all. And that clearly isn’t equitable, either for the patients concerned or for the clinician, who often feels frustrated and under pressure as a result. This course is designed to illustrate that there is a realistic solution to the dilemma and that a single session input can be surprisingly effective and rewarding, both for patients and clinicians. Appropriately for busy clinicians, this is an suitably short course!
A 3-day course.
An exposition on Compassion Focused Therapy, in a way that enables and encourages delegates to use it in their practice.
Although compassion focused therapy is delivered compassionately, its main focus is to encourage patients to be compassionate towards themselves. This is achieved by (a) specific techniques and approaches we cover on the course and (b) by educating patients about what happens in the brain so they realise that their emotions, behaviours, thoughts and fantasies are not their 'fault', and yet they can take certain actions to make things better for themselves (which we also cover). This is a course for people who do not necessarily want to be exclusively “a compassion focused therapist” but certainly DO want to know all about compassion focused therapy in order to build CFT ideas and techniques into their clinical repertoire. It therefore covers both the theory and the skills of CFT in a way they can be applied immediately.
A 3-day course.
'Once in a while there is a unique contribution to psychotherapy.'
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) moves away from focusing too closely on ‘symptom reduction’ towards teaching how to live in a stable and rewarding way. So it teaches how to get in touch with your values, how to act in accordance with them, how to be aware of ‘the you that is always there’, how to see your passing thoughts and feelings for just that, how to accept thoughts and feelings you don’t like without over-struggling with them, and so how to live mainly in the present.
A 3-day course.
This course meets demands for a thorough, consistent and values-led approach to Positive Behaviour Support.
The course covers the background and rationale for PBS and then looks at understanding an individual’s needs, analysing their behaviour and understanding the role it fulfils. Positive and proactive, the training will empower delegates to develop individual PBS plans aimed at improving their clients’ environment and wellbeing, thus decreasing the likelihood of disturbed behaviour. Using skills and understanding from the course delegates will be able to develop specific client-centred plans, also considering their situation and family / carers.
Given that some incidents will inevitably still occur the course also covers steps to manage a crisis and to continually review and improve the plan.
This is a powerful approach that improves the environment and wellbeing of both clients and staff. This is the only PBS course that is APT accredited and gives access to relevant web-based APT resources after the course.
Also known as SFBT (Solution-Focused Brief Therapy).
A 3-day course.
An approach to problems that is fundamentally positive and comes as a breath of fresh air to professionals and clients alike.
Another of APT's top courses, this aims to introduce you to the principles of SFT / SFBT in a way that gives you a firm grasp of them and enables you to use them in a safe and helpful way. You should become at home with the approach which is often seen as a 'breath of fresh air' both to client and professional, looking for and finding effective solutions for problems, rather than being sucked further and further into the problem itself.
A 3-day course. (2-day version also available.)
“The redefinition of recovery as a process of personal discovery, of how to live well with enduring symptoms and vulnerabilities opens the possibility of recovery to all ….” (Roberts, G & Wolfson, P.). This course aims to present you with a similarly inspiring presentation that educates, develops skills, and motivates you to use them.
A 3-day course.
Also known as the ‘Essentials course’ this course is available 'Open' (where you come to us) or Onsite (we come to you and deliver it to a group of up to 15 delegates).
Based on Miller and Rollnick's latest book, this course describes an organised way of helping people to recognise their problems and to do something about them. Principally it addresses behaviour about which the client has mixed feelings: drinking and substance misuse for example, but a surprising array of common mental and physical health problems as well. Issues from taking psychoactive medication through to eating more healthily can all be addressed using motivational interviewing.
A 3-day course.
Instruction in the key components of DBT for those who want to add them to their repertoire without necessarily becoming 'a DBT therapist'.
DBT brings together a series of skills and techniques which are powerful and well chosen ones, for working with personality disorder as well as in other areas. Many people want to familiarise themselves with these skills without necessarily becoming a DBT therapist exclusively, and this 3-day course is for you if you are one of those people as well as if you are thinking of taking the first step in becoming a DBT therapist. As well as covering the 'overall concept of DBT', it covers its 'essential elements', namely the concepts of: Validation; Metaphor; Relentless Problem Solving; and Contingency Management, and the skills of: Mindfulness; Distress Tolerance; Interpersonal Effectiveness; and Emotional Regulation.
A 3-day course.
A favourite introduction to this powerful, evidence-based technique.
Now in its latest form this course has introduced Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to thousands of people ever since 1983. It addresses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in a way that you can use after the course. It covers: the history and meaning of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, conceptualising cases in CBT terms, the format of a standard CBT session, and the most important CBT techniques. All in a way that applies it constantly to practical examples.
A 3-day course.
A relentlessly positive approach to working with disturbed and challenging behaviour.
The 3-day RAID® course is a leading positive psychology approach for tackling disturbed and challenging behaviour at source: over 20,000 professionals have attended it. It is a comprehensive approach which teaches staff a philosophy and practice not only to deal with disturbed and challenging behaviour when it occurs, but also to prevent it by tackling it at source. Staff feel pleased to share a unified system and to know what they are doing and why they are doing it, while clients delight in a relentlessly positive and empowering approach. The essence of the RAID® approach is to play down disturbed and challenging behaviour as far as safety allows, and to nurture and develop positive behaviour so that it systematically overwhelms and displaces the disturbed and challenging behaviour.
The APT offers a range of over 80 separate courses, all of which are available exclusively to your team.
They can be brought to you live face-to-face, or live online via Zoom or Teams. Click below to see all courses.