Creative Arts Therapist

This maternity cover role offers a rare opportunity to step into the heart of Neptune School and experience the meaningful, relationship‑centred work we do every day to support our pupils. As a Creative Arts Therapist joining us for this period, you’ll become part of a nurturing, multidisciplinary community where your skills can make a genuine difference.

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 practice sessions with team members, encouraging and assisting them to express their thoughts and feelings, and discuss pupil learning experiences. This places the learning journey of our pupils at the centre of the work, 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 Creative Arts Therapist will involve:

• Taking a neurodiverse affirming and trauma-informed approach to clinical work, you’ll work with a small caseload of learners with neurodiverse needs 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.
• Administration tasks including keeping records up to date.
• Attending monthly Psychological Services team meetings and quarterly Integrated Therapies Team meetings.

To be a successful Creative Arts 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 – a working understanding of Microsoft packages like Excel, Word, Outlook and Teams.
• A full driving licence, as travel to other sites may be required.

In return for your time, you’ll get:

• 28 days annual leave, including public holidays.
• Pension scheme based on you paying in 5%, and us adding 3%.
• Comprehensive learning opportunities for team members to develop themselves.
• Access to discounts through the Blue Light Card and our own employee benefits platform.
• Mental health and wellbeing support, including a six weekly confidential check-in clinic and group reflective practice sessions.
• Cycle to work scheme enabling you to buy a bicycle at a discounted rate.
• Coverage of the cost for an enhanced DBS check.
• Eligibility for our Medicash scheme after 12 months service, covering a wide range of medical, health and wellbeing expenses.
• 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.