Arts Therapist CPD and the HCPC Audit

Arts therapist is one of the HCPC's umbrella registrations. It covers four protected titles — art psychotherapist, art therapist, dramatherapist and music therapist — spanning three different creative disciplines that share a regulatory home and very little else in day-to-day practice.

The HCPC describes an arts therapist as a psychological therapist who has arts-based experience and training in psychological interventions, using drama, music or art as their primary mode of communication. That definition matters for CPD, because it tells you the profession is assessed as a psychological therapy rather than as an art form.

How arts therapists performed

For the 2020 to 2022 renewal cycle:

Zero removals, and an 81.8 per cent first-time acceptance rate that is above most of the comparable professions in the published cycles. The deferral rate of 9.6 per cent is also low by comparison — roughly one in ten rather than the one in four seen elsewhere. On this evidence arts therapists are better at keeping a record than the register average, which is not the direction most people would guess.

The requirement

There is no hours target. The HCPC does not set a number of hours or points you have to complete, and does not approve or endorse any CPD activities.

Five standards apply. Registrants must maintain a continuous, up-to-date and accurate record of their CPD; demonstrate that their activities are a mixture of learning relevant to current or future practice; seek to ensure the CPD has contributed to the quality of their practice and service delivery; seek to ensure it benefits the service user; and, on request, present a written profile that is their own work and supported by evidence.

The only number anywhere in them is in the second standard: a mixture means at least two different types of learning activity.

Your window and the selection

The arts therapist renewal window opens 1 March 2028 and closes 31 May 2028 — the latest of the professions in the current published cycle, which gives most registrants a long runway.

The HCPC randomly selects 2.5 per cent of each profession at the start of its renewal. Selection is computer-generated, only registrants of two years or more are eligible, and it can recur. If selected you are emailed at the start of the window with a message in your online account, have approximately three months to submit, and receive a reminder about a month before the deadline. Failing to submit a profile or requested information may lead to removal.

Confirm your dates at source on the HCPC's renewals page, which carries the full table.

What counts, across four titles

The breadth of this registration is an advantage for the second standard. Clinical supervision, personal therapy where it informs practice, experiential workshops in your own modality, reading and research written up, service evaluation, teaching or supervising trainees, presenting case material, and learning in an adjacent modality all count and are genuinely different activity types.

Two specific points for arts therapists. First, maintaining your own arts practice is defensible CPD where you can show how it informs clinical work — but the link has to be written down, because the HCPC assesses the psychological intervention, not the artistic output. Second, supervision is central to this profession and is unambiguously CPD, yet a profile built almost entirely from supervision reads as one activity type. Pair it.

Whatever the activity, standards three and four ask what changed in your practice and what the service user got from it. A reflective line on outcome is what turns an entry into evidence.

Why the umbrella matters more here than elsewhere

Most HCPC registrations cover one occupation. This one covers three disciplines whose training routes, professional literature and practice settings differ substantially, and a fourth title — art psychotherapist — that signals a particular theoretical orientation within one of them.

That has two practical consequences. The first is that generic arts therapies CPD may not stretch you: a workshop pitched across all modalities will often be more useful as a second activity type than as the core of your learning. The second is that cross-modality learning is unusually available to you and unusually defensible — a dramatherapist learning about music therapy's evidence base is doing something a physiotherapist has no equivalent of, and it satisfies the mixture standard cleanly.

It also means the published audit figures cover all four titles together. An 81.8 per cent acceptance rate tells you how arts therapists as a regulatory group performed, not how music therapists or dramatherapists did individually, and the HCPC does not break the figures down by title.

The profile itself

It covers activities since your last renewal with supporting evidence, including a dated list, specifically so assessors can identify gaps of more than three consecutive months that have not been accounted for. Continuity is what is being tested; an explained gap is fine. Our guide to what to put in an HCPC CPD profile sets out the structure.

At least one assessor on your profile will be an arts therapist, though note that the HCPC's unit of assessment is the profession rather than your specific modality — a music therapist's profile may be read by an art therapist.

The five standards are identical across all fifteen HCPC professions; only the renewal window, cohort size and assessor profession vary. For comparison, the practitioner psychologist registration is the other large umbrella title and has no published audit figures at all, while the orthoptist results show how differently a small cohort can look.