Newsletter Archives - Catalyse

The sun shines on us again, the Easter break is behind us, and we’re looking ahead to the rest of 2026. We wanted to share:

some news and updates on CPD
details of a CPD survey you can complete
the next Practitioner Course intake in May
where to find us on social media, and
a little ‘tech-ed’ on emails and newsletter updates

CPD News

Our first two CPD events of the year were well received. Participant feedback suggested they valued Sue Walsh and Kate Freshwater’s Thinking Organisationally: Developing CAT Supervision and Consultancy Skills in February, and Kim Dent-Brown’s 6-Part Story Method online event in March. Both shared a common theme of metaphor and story. The Thinking Organisationally event additionally helped to introduce the approach that Sue and colleagues offer in the developing O-CAT strand of Catalyse work.

Another of David Harvey’s CAT as a Tool For Leadership online days took place on 23rd April. We keep a rolling waiting list for repeats of his very popular day, and hope he may offer another later in the year.

Forthcoming CPD

Next up will be a two-day Introduction to Cognitive Analytic Therapy on 15/16 June. Founding course trainer Sarah Littlejohn is offering this in-person in Manchester. The workshop is ideal for those planning to apply for CAT Practitioner Training. Additionally it gives participants a flavour of the teaching style plus how we utilise the first series of CAT Training Films as part of the Catalyse training. Please share with anyone who may be interested.

On 19 June, David Harvey and Kate Freshwater lead a fully booked day in Manchester on CAT Reflective Practice: Skills for Facilitation. Do contact us if you’re interested in attending in a repeat.

We have several new events in the pipeline for later in the year, including a full day on Working with Challenging Scenarios in CAT on 14 September. This day will feature a selection of the second series of Training Films developed by Catalyse. Films Director Kathryn Pemberton will lead this day along with Rhona Brown. They will offer an opportunity for qualified CAT therapists, supervisors and trainers to work on their practice and skills in addressing threats to the therapeutic alliance through a variety of clinical challenges. More details will be available soon.

2026 CPD Survey

A number of other CPD events for 2026 are in development, but we are also keen to hear from you, our local CAT community, about your CPD needs. We invite you to complete an anonymous survey by the end of May.

Complete the 2026 Catalyse CPD Survey

As a small organisation, we may not be able to meet all needs, but your responses will help us consider and plan accordingly in our forthcoming CPD programme.

As ever, if you’re interested in offering to run a day, please do contact CPD Lead Jo Coggins. She will be pleased to hear your ideas and tell you more about practicalities and fees.

CAT Practitioner Training 2026 – 2028

The application window for the 2026 to 2028 CAT Practitioner Training Course is open. The deadline for applications is 30 May 2026.

Full details for both the standard and NHSE funded routes into training are available at 2026-2028 CAT Practitioner Training. There is some additional information this year on entry for those who have completed an ACAT-accredited Foundation Course year.

We look forward to receiving and reading all applications. Interviews take place on 26 June.

Supervisors’ availability

We remain hugely grateful to all of those who support the Practitioner Training by marking written and recorded work, providing supervision, facilitating seminar groups, and offering training therapies. Please do keep us updated on your availability to supervise. This is a key factor in the matrix of arrangements which underpin the training. We always welcome hearing from CATs if you would like to contribute to the course in any way. For example you might want to consider contributing to the course as trainer, supervisor, seminar facilitator, marker or training therapist.

Catalyse on Social Media

After the changes from a more ‘accepting-to-accepted’ Twitter to a far more polarised and problematic X, we are no longer active there. For now we are keeping our X account live to preserve the ‘footprint’ of tweets and interactions of previous years.

We have a Bluesky account so if you are also there, please do follow us and connect. We have recently set up a Linked In account too, which seems to be a platform where a lot of CATs are present. Do feel free to connect with us there, as we find our feet with that platform. Catalyse Exec/Trainer Team members on Facebook sometimes post news of events on the UK CAT Therapists group there.

We don’t currently have plans to branch out into any of the video/reel based social media platforms. However if any CATs in our networks are interested in this area and would like to help us think about whether and how to grow a presence in social media, then do get in touch.

Subscribing to (and Opting Out of) Our Communications

We value the connections that have been established over the years with the CAT community both locally and further afield who are interested in Catalyse and the various services offered. However we only want to ‘push where it moves’. If for any reason you no longer want to receive our update mailouts, you can easily unsubscribe. Do this through clicking on the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the foot of any of our Mailchimp mailouts.

The internet is improving around privacy controls, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, sometimes this can mean spam filters get triggered even when you do actually want to receive a communication. This sometimes happens for example when we try to contact supervisors and trainees at NHS addresses, or through certain email providers such as Gmail. This can be mutually frustrating. So to avoid our direct emails (ending @catalyse.uk.com) or Mailchimp mailouts being blocked, please help by taking the following steps.

Don’t

mark Catalyse emails as ‘spam’ or ‘junk’ if you don’t want us to contact you. Instead just drop us a quick line at info@catalyse.uk.com to say thanks but no thanks, and we’ll remove you.
ignore any Catalyse emails that you do want to see, that you find in your Junk folder. Instead, mark them as ‘not Junk’, and hopefully they won’t be sent there again.

Do

add any Catalyse email addresses from which you do want to receive emails, to your address book or contacts.
mark them as ‘not Spam’ or ‘not Junk’.
if you wish, also whitelist the address(es) through your email provider set-up. (E.g. in Gmail, you can set up a filter such as ‘Never send it to Spam’ by going to your Settings, then ‘Filters and blocked addresses’)
if you have ongoing problems receiving Catalyse communications in your NHS setting, you could also contact your IT department. Asking them to whitelist our emails may help.

N.B. we process your personal data in accordance with the Catalyse Privacy Policy and update this regularly if any changes are made.

We hope you do want to stay in touch through updates like these. For those signed up to our mailing list, we emailed a version of this bulletin at the end of April. In any case, we’ll share more details of news and forthcoming events here on the website, which you can always visit when you want to.

It’s been a while since we published a newsletter to update on new developments. At our recent Executive group meeting in November 2021 we thought we’d try updating more regularly on the blog. If you’re interested in following Catalyse activities this is another way to stay informed.

Practitioner Training

We made the decision to defer the next intake of the Practitioner Training until 2022. However this doesn’t seem to have made 2021 a less busy year. We’re pleased to have had a great deal of interest in the course already. The deadline for applications is May 6th next year and we look forward to checking our inbox then. Marisol Cavieres provided her final training day in October, and has now moved on from her tutor role after ten years of working with us. This makes way for trainer Jo Coggins to take on the tutor role for our new October 2022 intake, working alongside Kathyrn Pemberton who is the tutor for the 2021 cohort.

People

This year we’ve also had further additions in that David Harvey has joined us as an associate. Jenny Marshall has also joined and taken on a lead role for Personal Reformulations. Additionally, Cath Laverty has come on board in a Non-Executive Director role. Glenys Parry made the transition to a Non-Executive Director role after retiring from her Executive and Finance roles at the end of August. Her inimitable mix of wisdom, strategic precision, seemingly limitless practical skill, plus her warmth, irreverence and humour, have aided Catalyse since its inception. We miss her in our Executive meetings. However we’re pleased she’ll remain involved in a number of other ways. Alongside their practitioner training roles, Dawn Bennett and Sarah Littlejohn are now Co-Chairs of Catalyse and Dawn is Finance Director.

CPD

After a pandemic-related pause, four CPD events over the second half of this year have been well received. Our December event on Therapy for Parents and the Family Court Process is the most well-subscribed of the year, but there are still spaces if you wish to book on. David Harvey will be repeating his in-person CPD day on CAT as a Tool for Leadership on Thursday 5th May 2022. More details and booking options for this will be available soon.

CPD lead Jo Coggins is in touch with several colleagues about a number of other stimulating CPD days over the coming year. We’ve streamlined the CPD proposal process so that there is a bit less form-filling. Instead the process includes more conversation with Jo to begin developing a proposal. We hope this will help prospective presenters move from an idea to something firm. If you have chats with Jo on Zoom you may not spot her swapping a tentative pencil for a more confident pen. Have no doubt she will be working towards getting a definite date in the calendar. Then the website work gets properly underway and we can start to advertise your event.

Many of you completed our CPD survey earlier this year. In response, for 2022 we’re planning to offer a range of different events to suit different pockets and purposes. This includes a mix of face-to-face and online events, and we will share more details soon.

Catalyse Training Films

It’s just over a year since the Catalyse training films became available to stream. Vimeo recently informed us they have had over one thousand views. We’re about to launch a brief survey to ask more about the experience of those who have used them to date in training, or their own learning. Catalyse practitioner course trainees have direct access to them throughout training. Other CAT Practitioner training courses and Clinical Psychology courses have purchased subscriptions too, and some have also arranged for their trainees to have direct access at a small cost-per-head fee. Being able to watch the films at any time means that learners can use the materials more flexibly. In addition to viewing them direct during remote training days, they can also review them in their own time.

We didn’t really anticipate that individuals might want to subscribe to the films as a preparation for training in CAT. However we’ve discovered that there is some interest in this. As a result we’re reviewing the subscription costs to make it more possible for people to access them in this way. We’ll share details of new subscription arrangements shortly.

Training Films: Take Two

Not content with one series of materials, supporting initial skills development in cognitive analytic therapy, we are well underway with a second series. This is thanks to a generous donation from a charitable endowment fund by Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. Their contribution is enabling Kathryn Pemberton and a small group of CAT colleagues to plan and produce a further five short films, in conjunction with Brickoven Media and a number of local CAT colleagues.

The first series is suitable for introductory and year 1 practitioner training. Using different fictional scenarios, this second series of films will demonstrate a range of situations presenting more complex therapeutic challenges. From countertransference and strong expressed emotions, to rupture linked to values and world-views, the films aim to demonstrate more advanced CAT skills and competences. Again they will not be striving to show ‘perfect’ clinical practice. Instead, they explore the richness of such therapeutic encounters and possible responses by CAT therapists. As learning resources we hope they will facilitate exploration, discussion and debate around more advanced CAT skills and competences.

The recent weekend of improvisation and filming at GMMH premises in Manchester deserves a blog in its own right. Until that emerges, you can see a few visual highlights and glimpses of therapists who kindly gave up parts of their Sundays to help us, on the #CatalyseFilms hashtag on Twitter. If you’re not on Twitter you can scroll back to view the Twitter feed here on the website.

Staying involved with Catalyse

As ever, we welcome approaches from ACAT-accredited CAT therapists across the North of England who would like to become involved in the work of Catalyse in some way. There are plenty of possibilities. You can read more about how to go about this in Dawn and Glenys’ guidelines here. And of course you can always contact us through our administrator Frances Free.