Training as an Art Therapist: UK and US Routes, and What the Credentials Mean

Becoming an art therapist in the United Kingdom means a postgraduate masters with supervised clinical placements and a period in personal therapy, followed by registration with the Health and Care Professions Council, which is what makes the protected titles lawful to use. In the United States there is no equivalent single gate: there is a national voluntary credentialing body, a set of credentials that stack, and state licensure that varies from state to state. Explaining the second honestly is the harder half of this page, and the part most sources get wrong.

I cannot speak to art therapy training from the inside. I have never trained as an arts therapist of any kind, I am a community arts practitioner, and I have no personal account of a masters, a placement or a registration application to offer. What I have is a side view that has been unexpectedly instructive. Over the years, several art therapy students and applicants have turned up to volunteer at my care home singing sessions, looking for hours and for experience with people, and what surprised me was what they were actually being asked to accumulate. I had assumed they needed a stronger portfolio. They did not. Two of them had first class fine art degrees and had been told by admissions tutors, in more or less these words, that the portfolio was the least of it and that what was missing was time in a room with people who were unwell. One had been turned down twice and advised to go and get paid support work rather than more art. And all of them, once on a course, were in weekly personal therapy that they were paying for themselves, for the length of the training, which I had wrongly assumed was a recommendation rather than a requirement. What they wrote in their reflective journals afterwards was not about the residents. It was about themselves.

So the one thing I now say to anybody who asks me about the route is this: the question that decides it is not whether you are good at art. It is whether you can sit with somebody’s distress for an hour without needing to fix it, explain it or fill the silence, and you can test that for nothing in an ordinary support role before you spend a penny on an application. The rest of this page is the structure around that, drawn from the profession’s published requirements and checked by the registered practitioner who reviews it.

Nothing on this page is an efficacy claim, so no tier label appears in it. Where this site does make a claim about whether something works it grades it Tier 1, Tier 2 or Tier 3, with Tier 3 always specified as either not properly studied or studied and null: the method is on reading arts in health research, and a worked example on art therapy for psychosis.

The UK route

A postgraduate masters at an approved programme, supervised clinical placements, personal therapy during training, then registration. Those four things in that order, and none of them is optional.

The academic qualification is a masters in art therapy or art psychotherapy, taken full time or part time depending on the institution. Programmes are approved by the regulator, which means the qualification is designed to deliver the standards required for registration rather than only an academic award. Applications usually require a first degree, evidence of a sustained personal art practice, and relevant experience of working with people in health, care, education, social care or a comparable setting. That experience requirement is heavier than most applicants expect and is the most common reason a first application does not succeed.

The clinical placements are the spine of the course. Trainees work in real services with real people, under the supervision of an experienced practitioner, and the placements are ordinarily unpaid. They also have to be got to, which is a practical constraint people underestimate: placement allocation is not always local and travel is at the trainee’s expense. Everything that happens on a placement runs into the same duties as everything else in a care or clinical setting, including the ones set out on consent and safeguarding in arts in health.

Personal therapy is the requirement that distinguishes this training from most postgraduate courses and it catches people out. Trainees are required to be in their own therapy through the training, at their own cost, and the rationale is direct: this is a psychotherapeutic profession, the practitioner’s own responses are part of the working material, and somebody who has never been on the other side of the room is poorly placed to sit on this one. It is a real financial and emotional commitment and it should be planned for at the point of applying, not discovered in the first term.

Registration with the Health and Care Professions Council comes at the end. It is not automatic paperwork attached to the degree; it is a separate application against the regulator’s standards, and it is maintained afterwards through continuing professional development and periodic renewal, with the regulator able to remove somebody from the register. The professional body, the British Association of Art Therapists, is a separate thing again: it maintains a members directory and publishes practice standards¹, and membership of it is not registration. Both are worth checking about any practitioner, and only one of them is the law.

What the training is not

It is not an art degree with a caring flavour, and a fine art background is common without being either necessary or straightforwardly an advantage.

Programmes do want a personal art practice, which is different from an art qualification: evidence that making things is a habit you have, that you know what materials do, and that you can be in a difficult relationship with your own work. What they do not want is a teacher. The reflexes that a strong artistic training installs, to improve a composition, to correct a proportion, to demonstrate a better way of holding the brush, to make the thing good, are close to the opposite of what the work requires. Several practitioners have described having to unlearn that, and the applicants I have met were being told as much before they even started.

It is also not a course in interpreting pictures. The idea that art therapists are trained to read images the way a dream dictionary reads a dream is the most persistent public misconception about the profession, and it is not the method. What is taught is psychotherapeutic theory, clinical assessment, risk, record keeping, group work, working within multidisciplinary teams, and the use of supervision. What happens in an art therapy session describes what that produces in practice.

And it is not a shorter version of a counselling course with paint added. It is a psychotherapy training. That is why the personal therapy requirement exists and why the placements are clinical rather than observational.

The size of the profession at the end of it

Small. In July 2026 the Health and Care Professions Council register listed 6,103 arts therapists across all four protected titles², for UK populations in the tens of millions.

The four titles are art psychotherapist, art therapist, dramatherapist and music therapist. Art therapist and art psychotherapist are two separate protected titles covering one profession, which is why the common phrase the three arts therapies is wrong. Using any of the four without being on the register is a criminal offence rather than a breach of etiquette, and the protection covers the title and not the activity: anybody may put paints on a table in a care home, and no law prevents it, which is the line drawn on art therapy against an art class. What the regulated profession itself covers, and who it is offered to, is on art therapy.

That register total is worth carrying around while thinking about the career. It is the reason posts are scarce and geographically uneven, the reason many practitioners work across several part time contracts, and the reason a great deal of arts work in health settings is delivered by people who are not registered and are not claiming to be. Two of the four titles have their own pages, dramatherapy and the parallel route on training as a music therapist, and one closely related profession sits outside the register entirely: dance movement psychotherapist is not an HCPC protected title, and dance movement psychotherapy sets out what applies instead.

The US route, and what the credentials mean

The United States has no single statutory gate. It has education standards, a national voluntary credentialing body, and state licensure that varies from state to state.

The credentials, all awarded by the Art Therapy Credentials Board, are these³:

Credential	What it is
ATR-P	Provisional registration, held while a graduate accrues supervised clinical experience
ATR	Registered art therapist, awarded once education and supervised experience requirements are met
ATR-BC	Board certified, adding a written examination and maintained by recertification
ATCS	Certified supervisor, for experienced practitioners who supervise others

Two features matter for anybody trying to interpret them. They stack: ATR-BC does not replace ATR, and one person may hold ATR, ATR-BC and ATCS simultaneously. And they are credentials, not licences. ATCB is a certifying body rather than a regulator, and it runs a public verification tool that will confirm whether a named individual currently holds a credential and in what standing, which is the check to run on a person. State licensure is a separate and patchy layer: some states license art therapists specifically, some fold the practice into a broader counselling licence, and some do neither, so the legally meaningful question in the United States depends on which state you are standing in.

Why no count of US credential holders appears anywhere on this site

Because the published numbers do not reconcile, and the reason they do not reconcile is instructive rather than merely inconvenient. This is the section most people arrive at this page for, so here is the whole trail.

ATCB publishes two different, undated and unreconciled figures on its own website, on different pages, with no breakdown attached to either³. Neither is supported by the tables in the board’s own annual reports.

Its 2021 annual report states a total of 6,235 active credential holders. But 6,235 is the Total row of the table, which includes applications and retired credentials, and the Active rows in the same table sum to 4,955⁴. Its 2020 report states 8,226, where the rows sum to 8,053 and the Active rows to 7,150⁵. Between the two reports, Active ATR falls from 3,165 in 2020 to 1,861 in 2021, with no explanation offered anywhere in either document.

And underneath all of that sits the structural problem, which no correction to the arithmetic would fix: the credentials stack. One person holding ATR, ATR-BC and ATCS appears in three rows. So none of these tables counts people at all, and a reader who wants to know how many art therapists there are in the United States is not being answered by any of them even where the sums work.

This site therefore publishes no US art therapy credential figure. That is a settled position rather than a gap awaiting a better source, and it is the same discipline applied to a much more famous number on reading arts in health research.

If a US scale figure is genuinely needed, there is one that can be used, provided it is labelled precisely. The American Art Therapy Association reports more than 4,200 members worldwide in its 2024 Annual Impact Report, published 20 May 2025⁶. That is association membership rather than credentials, and AATA is a different organisation from ATCB. Described that way it is a usable indication of scale. Presented as a headcount of American art therapists, it is not, and it should never be substituted for the credential number that does not exist.

Other countries, briefly

Provision and protection vary enormously, and the UK model of a statutory register with criminal sanction is not the norm.

In Australia, New Zealand and parts of Asia, the relevant body is ANZACATA, which operates a professional membership register for creative arts therapists rather than statutory regulation⁷. A membership register is a real credential and a different legal animal: it sets entry standards and can remove somebody from its list, and it does not make a title unlawful for anybody else to use. Elsewhere in Europe and beyond, arrangements range from statutory protection to nothing at all, and the practical question anywhere is the same one: what body holds the list, what did somebody have to do to get on it, and can I search it.

The money, and the two figures this site does not quote

Two numbers people reasonably want are absent here, and each is absent for its own reason rather than through oversight.

This site quotes no course fee figure. Fees vary by institution, by year, by mode of study and by residency status, no single number would be true across programmes or true for long, and no such figure sits in this site’s locked source list. Programmes publish their own fees, and those are the numbers to plan with. Two costs are easier to miss and worth budgeting from the outset: personal therapy for the duration of the training, which the trainee funds, and placements, which are unpaid and have to be travelled to.

This site attributes no fee figure to the British Association of Art Therapists, because BAAT publishes its fee guidance to members only¹. There is consequently no public number from the profession’s own UK body, and any BAAT attributed fee encountered anywhere has acquired that attribution somewhere along the way rather than from the source.

On earnings after qualifying, the honest position is that most UK art therapists are employed by health services, local authorities, schools, charities and hospices on published pay structures, and that part time and multiple contracts are common in a profession of 6,103 registrants across four titles². Anybody deciding whether the training is financially viable should look at actual advertised posts in their region rather than at any national generalisation, including this one.

Who the work suits, and who it does not

It suits people who can tolerate not knowing, not fixing and not being thanked. It does not suit people who came for the art.

The capacities that come up repeatedly are these: sitting with distress without acting on the urge to resolve it; tolerating long silences; being comfortable that a session may produce nothing visible; using supervision honestly, including about your own reactions; and writing clear records, going to team meetings and working inside institutions that are frequently underfunded and sometimes obstructive. A great deal of the job is not in the room. It is notes, referrals, meetings, waiting lists and explaining to colleagues what the profession is.

The people who struggle are, in my limited observation from the volunteering side, the ones who wanted to bring art to people. That is a real and worthwhile motivation and it is the motivation for a different job, described below. Wanting to share something you love is not the same as wanting to sit inside somebody else’s difficulty for a year without knowing whether it is helping.

The community arts route, which is a different job and not a lesser one

If what you want is to make art with people in health and care settings, you can do that without training as a therapist, and you should be clear with yourself and with everybody else that it is a different job.

This is my own route and I would defend it to anybody. Community arts practitioners, participatory artists, artists in residence and activities staff run painting groups, printmaking, choirs, songwriting and craft in wards, homes, hospices, prisons and community halls. There is no protected title, no statutory register and no single qualification, and the work is reached through arts organisations, local authorities, charities, care providers and social prescribing schemes: arts on prescription and craft making and mental health describe the terrain. Good practice in it involves training you do have to seek out, in safeguarding, in working with people who lack capacity, and in knowing where your competence stops.

What the route does not permit is the vocabulary. You may not call yourself an art therapist, you should not call the session art therapy, and if a manager asks you to because a funding form has a box for therapeutic input, the right answer is to help them fill in the box accurately instead. The distinction is not snobbery in either direction. Both sides of it help people, only one is regulated, and evidence proved about one does not transfer to the other.

If you are weighing the two, the cheapest test remains the one I give to everybody who asks: go and spend a season in an ordinary support role, or volunteering in a service, and find out what happens to you in a room with people who are very unwell. Everything else about this route, the applications, the masters, the placements, the personal therapy, the register, follows from the answer to that, and no amount of talent with a brush substitutes for it.