Art Therapy MA

Why MA Art Therapy at the University of Hertfordshire?


• Employment prospects: Our postgraduates work across the NHS, Social Services, adult and child mental health, rehabilitation, palliative care, learning disabilities, forensic settings, and mainstream schools. 



• Industry accreditation: Approved by The Health Care Professions Council (HCPC).  



• Strong industry connections: You will benefit from our excellent links with the NHS, public and private sector, and organisations such as ECArTE to provide you with entrepreneurial skills to help you start your own services. 



• Industry work placements: You will have a supervised placement for 120 days providing you with experience and employment in healthcare, education and/or voluntary organisations.  



Join a vocational course, comprising of campus and placement-based learning. We’ll teach you through a combination of lectures, seminars and workshops, to bring together theory and practice. We offer a stimulating learning environment, teaching through role play, visual art practice, peer participation and experiential group work.

You’ll complete 96 days of supervised placement learning to give you valuable experience in practicing art therapy in real-life settings. This experience will help guide you to become a mindful, relational and ethical art therapist.

Every step of the way, we’ll encourage you to be an active learner. To be creative. Art making lies at the heart of this course, so you’ll have lots of opportunities to develop strong practical skills. Plus, you’ll reflect on how to use your own art making as therapy practice.

Outside of the course, we’ll require you to explore your own therapeutic journey. To engage with personal therapy to gain self-awareness and to see the approaches used to facilitate honesty of expression.

The course is offered on a full-time (2 years) and part-time (4 years) basis. With students on each pathway studying together. Both pathways are equally weighted in terms of practice-based and campus-based learning.

We welcome creative and psychologically minded students from a wide range of cultural, ethnic and social backgrounds.