The Academy of Play and Child Psychotherapy
Therapeutic Play Skills & Play Therapy
- the UK's largest and most experienced dedicated training organisation
- the best support services for all levels of practitioners
The
report’s purpose is to demonstrate the:
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Very high quality of the programme
-
Extent to which APAC measures the
learning experience of participants
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Degree to which the courses produce
safe and effective practitioners
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Experience that future participants
are likely to have
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Transparency of APAC’s training
activities so that prospective participants can make an informed choice
about their training options
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Evidence that investment of time and
money by an individual or by an employer is very worthwhile
Index to this Quality Monitoring Report:
Summary of findings
Profile of course participants
Reaction of participants -
how
satisfied were they with the training?
How
good was the learning?
What
changes did it make to the participants?
What results were achieved in the participants work
with the children?
This report is
a summarized version of the formal 2009/10 annual review report submitted
to:
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APAC’s collaborative academic partner Canterbury Christchurch University (CCCU)
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Play Therapy United Kingdom (PTUK) – the organization providing a professional infrastructure for play therapy in the UK
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Play Therapy International (PTI) – responsible for implementing the international standards of play therapy training and practice standards
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The InternationaI Board of Examiners in Child and Play Therapy (IBECPT) – an wholly independent organization that ratifies the standards proposed and administered by PTI and also audits the course work produced from a professional practice aspect
How we measure the quality of our training:
APAC uses Play Therapy International (PTI)’s and
PTUK's standards recommendations for evaluating training.
This requires a four level approach based on
the Kirkpatrick model.
Reaction – how the trainee
responds to the training content, methods and trainers – this is assessed
through the use of ‘Happy?’ questionnaires normally at the end of the
course.
APAC uses these for every theme, or block of training
as well as at the end of the course.
They enable us to react quickly to any problems
that might arise.
Although it is important that the facilitators
build a good rapport with the trainees, this is only the start!
Learning – what have the participants
learnt? Courses that are accredited by an educational institution such as a
university will have formal methods of assessing how much has been learnt.
This may be by exam and/or by written
assignments.
APAC uses the latter, fulfilling CCCU’s
standards and criteria for marking at post graduate level, which are also
determined by the QAA – the UK body responsible for the quality of higher
education.
The internal marking of what is known as
summative assignments is moderated by an External Examiner appointed by the
University and also by an IBECPT audit.
The vast majority of training organisations
stop at this level.
Behaviour – how has what has been learnt changed the
individual’s behaviour?
APAC subscribes to the view that ‘what you can
do’ is more important than ‘what you know’ in terms of play therapy
practice, whilst acknowledging that the ‘doing’ has to have a sound basis of
knowledge.
This is why we measure the application of
knowledge through the changes in participants’ behaviour in their practice
work, supporting activities and in their personal development.
Results – the measurable outcomes that have been achieved as a result of the learning and changes in the trainees’ behaviour. APAC’s purpose is to train safe and effective play therapy practitioners – so we measure the clinical outcomes of their work. We have adopted the standard psychometric instrument used to measure the mental health of British children (the Goodman’s SDQ).
This report is based on the evaluations from and of
365 participants, (from 23 cohorts, 14 Post Graduate Certificate
and 9 Post Graduate Diploma courses), who
have finished their taught modules within the 2009/2010 academic year.
The statistical results are therefore reliable
because of this large number of trainees,
our
programme being the largest play therapy training programme in the world.
It is a sub-set of a
larger report, submitted to CCCU and the IBECPT, which contains further
detail, some related to individual persons and whose rights to
confidentiality we are protecting.
In the main report we generally use the scales
required by the University and IBECPT, ranging from 1 = ‘poor’ to 5 =
‘excellent’.
In
this version we have converted these figures to more familiar percentages eg
a score of 4.25 is equivalent to 85%.
Summary | Profile of participants | Reaction | Learning | Changes to participants | Results
Ó Copyright APAC Ltd
Octiber 2010