We are delighted and proud to announce that, from April 2025, the Institute of Family Therapy and Systemic Social Action (IFT) will be collaborating with the Centre for Systemic Studies (CSS) in Wales in order to run a United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) accredited 2-year Professional Qualifying Level Training (QLT) in Family and Systemic Psychotherapy.
The Centre for Systemic Studies
The Centre for Systemic Studies (https://www.centreforsystemicstudies.co.uk/) was founded as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company in 2020 by Leah Salter and the late Billy Hardy. Set up to build on the 50 plus years of legacy of the Family Institute in Wales, it aims to continue the founding principles of valuing relational approaches to all our work- in our teaching, research, therapy and community projects. The Family Institute has always been associated with ethics-led family therapy and systemic training with a strong emphasis on learning as a social endeavour. The CSS are proud to offer Family and Systemic Psychotherapy training across Wales and beyond, with courses at Introduction, Foundation, Intermediate, and Supervision levels now well established as part of their portfolio. After exploring a range of options to develop the last two years of Family and Systemic Psychotherapy training, CSS decided to launch their qualifying level (QLT) course delivered as a satellite programme through (IFT).
The Institute of Family Therapy
The Institute of Family Therapy and Systemic Social Action is the first and one of the best-known therapy and training organisations in the UK. Our training programmes offer high quality training in the field of systemic psychotherapy with families, couples, and individuals as well as systemic social action within organisations and communities.
The alignment of CSS and IFT
Both IFT and CSS provide high-quality, and socially conscious Family and Systemic Psychotherapy training based on the importance of centering social context, social justice and social action. This decision to collaborate in this way reflects CSS and IFT’s aligned commitment to social justice, action research methodologies and community learning principles. It fits closely with IFT’s and CSS’s mission to continue to co-create an ever-evolving progressive and responsive systemic community alongside our partners, supporters, colleagues, students and friends.
The IFT Qualifying Course
IFT trains approximately 300 people per year, from foundation to advanced level, to work with families, systems, networks, organisations and wider systems. Students work in statutory settings such as the NHS and Local Authorities as well as community-based contexts, and describe our training as ‘life-changing’ in the ways that it breathes life into the passionate change-makers within them.
Recently, IFT decoupled from universities, in order to develop a family systemic qualifying course that is more accessible to a broader and diverse range of people and reinvest resources into supporting students, while retaining our robust standards.
IFT aims to develop:
- systemic capacity at the community level in order to support communities to directly address social inequality and inequity
- access for people from community-level agencies / with lived experience into systemic training, in order to better serve communities and transform the profession for the better
- creative, responsive and ever more progressive forms of systemic intervention that positively impacts communities
By offering training in family systemic psychotherapy that:
- emphasises social justice and social action
- attempts to decolonise our curriculum by centering the voices of women, and black, brown and indigenous thinkers from the global majority
- centres the importance of intervening on multiple levels of context
- names systems of oppression, and reflects on how they work and why they persist
- links reflection and action together
Accreditation by The United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP)
The United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP), the leading organisation for regulating psychotherapists and psychotherapeutic counsellors in the UK, has accredited IFT’s QLT course with a glowing review that stated that the course, and what IFT are trying to achieve with it, is “exemplary”, “forward-thinking” and “pioneering”.
Academic Standards
IFT has a long tradition of maintaining academic standards and the decision to decouple from a University was accompanied by a strong ethical commitment to retaining academic and professional standards. In addition to the quality assurance infrastructure already in place, IFT has three external advisory boards which monitor and evaluate our work and guide our standards:
- Academic Quality and Standards Committee
- Professional Standards Board
- Participation Board
These Advisory Boards provide the forum in which the interests and perspectives of external academic and non-academic members are represented and support IFT to reflect on the on-going relationship between academic standards, professional standards and co-producing these standards and co-producing knowledge, with people with lived experience.
The IFT Qualifying Level training course 2025 cohort
From April 2025, IFT will be running a third cohort of this new UKCP – accredited 2-year Professional Qualifying Level Training in Family and Systemic Psychotherapy course with applicants from England and from Wales.
The QLT is a 2 year part time professional qualification that encompasses weekly clinical supervision groups alongside monthly blocks of a taught on-line plenary and an in-person teaching day.
The IFT course will run as usual in London and for Wales-based trainees, or those nearby CSS will operate as a satellite base for IFT, running clinical supervision groups and doing the in-person teaching day in Wales as part of IFT’s QLT course.
If you are in England or Wales and would like to know more about this course please come to our open day on 2nd December 2024, 17:30-19:00 (you can book your place here: www.ift.org.uk/events/).
