Sharing our knowledge and expertise is a key value here at Chiltern Music Therapy. One of the ways in which we embody this is through the trainings we offer for other Music Therapists and community musicians. This year, we are expanding and diversifying our training in order to widen our reach within and also outside our profession.

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Broadening our Reach

The most common questions we are asked are ‘what is music therapy?’ and ‘how can music help people?’ so we recognise that there is work to be done to increase understanding and awareness about the benefits of music therapy, ultimately raising the profile of the profession. Therefore our training is being extended to a variety of practitioners across the education, health and social care sectors including school staff, music teachers, healthcare and care workers, and the other allied health professionals to increase understanding of what music therapy is all about and how music could play a role in their work. We are also getting in at the grassroots of healthcare training courses and offering more lectures or training sessions to students. 

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Upcoming New Training

Launching soon is a new training workshop for care home/supported living staff that will equip them with a better understanding of how powerful music-making can be for people with dementia, neurodegenerative disorders or learning disabilities. We want to show that carers don’t need to have any musical experience or ability to introduce some basic but impactful music-making into their settings. 

We are also increasing capacity in the mental health sector by training and supporting professionals and carers who can identify and give support to adults and children with mental health issues. Through our training, many more practitioners, educators and carers discover the health and economic benefits of preventative music therapy, will understand how they can introduce music programmes through their own work at a local level, and know how to access or refer to music therapy services in their local area. Providing training courses and resources for families, relatives and communities helps to support people to understand how music can be beneficial for the mental health and wellbeing of themselves and those they care for. Our team of experienced music therapists and community musicians are able to pass on valuable tips, tools and ideas to help anyone supporting those with mental health conditions across a variety of sectors and settings. 

In the education sector, our training will help teaching and support staff in schools and SEND settings discover how to use music as a tool to support pupils to reach developmental or academic milestones, develop transferable skills for learning and improve understanding of social interaction. Integrating music into SEND teaching can also help to promote pupils’ independence and support their functional, cognitive and emotional difficulties.

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Building Connections

Bespoke training packages to other AHP organisations working in the medicolegal space has been invaluable and lead to some wonderful partnership opportunities for shared learning and opportunities to celebrate each other’s work and contributions and we’re now looking at developing our relationships with other AHP training organisations, music trusts and music education providers with the joint aim of sharing the power of music!

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Staying True to our Roots

Offering relevant and topical training for Music Therapists and other Arts in Health professionals will always be at our core. We are approved to deliver Outcome Star trainings in multiple sectors and also regularly run our GarageBand, Music Tech, Making Therapy Digital and How to Measure a Smile trainings. With the easing of restrictions, we have exciting plans underway for more face-to -face activity such as a music therapy workshop for musicians and music students, specific skills-based workshops for Music Therapists, and a new programme of CPD for Music Therapists and Community Musicians including guest speakers.  

With a workforce busy delivering music therapy services, it’s not always easy to resource our trainings so we have started building our internal pool of trainers through our own Train the Trainer programme. It has been a great way of sharing expertise amongst the team and learning from each other.

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Sharing the Benefits of Upskilling and Increasing Knowledge and Understanding

There are numerous benefits that attendees can gain from our training. We hope to spark new ideas, drive change and innovation, open the doors to new opportunities, encourage personal growth, help to fulfil professional requirements, increase confidence and see attendees leave training feeling inspired and upskilled.

One of the joys of training is having the opportunity to learn from your peers and share your stories and experiences. Sharing human stories is so important to all of us at Chiltern - we even have a Slack channel devoted to sharing our human stories from our work! 

Last year our training reached 1000 attendees and this year we want to reach even more, and hopefully face-to-face where possible. 

‘Together we harness the power of music, inspire through human story, and fascinate through science, to light up a network of champions’. We hope you will be one of our champions!

Find out more on our Training page or email training@chilternmusictherapy.co.uk