Category Archives: Training Films

a green meadow with dappled sunshine and seeding dandelion heads

Spring 2026 Update

CAT Practitioner Training, CPD, Featured, Newsletter, Training Films, , ,

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.

A still from a film scene. Seated woman with cropped hair to the right presses a pad of paper into the lap of a seated woman with gathered braided hair to the left.

Spring 2025 brings the second series of CAT Training Films

Training, Training Films

We are really pleased to announce that our the second series of CAT Training Films are now available to stream. They depict five different clinical scenarios, aiming to represent challenging situations that may be encountered in CAT. You can find all the details at the dedicated page here. For a flavour of the material, watch the short trailer below. Here you’ll also catch a glimpse of the team of actors who helped make the films possible.

We are very grateful to all those whose goodwill, energies and improvisations helped director Kathryn Pemberton facilitate and edit the finished versions. You can see a full list of contributors on the information page. If you’ve purchased a copy of editor Yvonne Steven’s Creativity and Mental Health: A Cognitive Analytic Approach to Integrating Play and Imagination in Psychotherapy, Supervision and Training, you may have seen Kathryn’s chapter (14). In this she recounts reflections on creating two series of training films on cognitive analytic therapy as aides to learning.

Frank Margison lent us his keen overseeing eye on the weekend of filming. Frank was one of the working group who helped conceive and develop this second project. Others who couldn’t make it on the day were Glenys Parry and Mark Evans, but Rhona Brown brought a shelf-full of CAT books to help set the weekend’s stage.

The venue for filming was kindly provided by Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust. Their Endowment Grant funding also helped make it possible to begin the initial stages of this project. The Brickoven Video Production Company team kept us to time and focus over the weekend. They took care of the myriad (and exacting) technical aspects of the filming, sound, lighting and set design. To see some of their images of the filming on the day, click on their logo below.

Brickoven video production company log consisting of a flat triangle made of 12 blocks in hues of orange and brown

We very much hope that these resources will add fruitfully to the range of materials available to scaffold learning in CAT. They aim to support reflection and debate about possible therapeutic responses. They are particularly geared towards year 2 of Practitioner level training, and further CPD applications of CAT.

If you’re interested in subscribing, whether as a course, a Trust, a trainer, or even an individual seeking to refine your clinical skills, then you can do so on either an annual or three month basis. All subscription details are available at this link.

Survey Time – CAT Training Films

Training Films

Have you subscribed to the first series of Catalyse CAT Training Films? Or has your training course arranged for you to access them like we do on the Catalyse Practitioner Training course? We would love to hear how you’ve found them now that they’ve been in circulation for nearly four years. We’ve therefore launched a second survey to gather feedback about the films, and supporting materials that accompany them, to help us evaluate their impact. 

In fact there are two surveys. One is for trainers – for example if you’ve subscribed for any length of time (or if your Trust or course has subscribed) and used them as part of teaching or training you’ve conducted. This could include lectures, seminars, courses or other events.

Complete the Trainers’ survey here

Click here for the Trainers’ survey

The other is for those who have seen the films as learners. This would include you if you’ve subscribed as an individual for your own learning purposes, or if you’ve seen the films when shared by your course or service trainers as part of a learning experience.

Complete the Learners’ survey here

Click here for the Learners’ survey

Each survey should just take a few minutes of your time. Both are anonymous, and we ask that you don’t leave personally identifying information. 

If, as a trainer, you’re aware of any more learners who have viewed the films but may not hear about the survey, you can help us even more by sharing with them this invitation, or the pdf flier below.

Please visit one or other survey as soon as you like. We will close it and collate the final results at the end of September.

Many thanks – we look forward to reading your comments.

Catalyse Films 1 Survey 2023

For more information about the first set of films, you can see the dedicated ‘CAT Training Films – Series 1′ page at this link.

New CAT Training Films Fliers

CAT Practitioner Training, Training Films

Curious about the Catalyse Training Films? Including the new set soon to be available? Then read on…..

You might already be familiar with the first series of films, released in September 2020. Catalyse Practitioner course trainees have access to these to supplement the first year of their training. To date a further three Practitioner level training courses have subscribed too. Additionally, a CAT Skills course, three D Clin Psych courses, and an NHS Trust have taken out subscriptions. We didn’t anticipate that individuals would sign up to them but have found that some do. We hope to launch a second survey of trainer and learner experience about using the films. If you’ve made use of them, do look out for this opportunity to feed back in the next few months.

A second set of films, on Working With Challenging Situations in Cognitive Analytic Therapy, is inching closer to release. This series of five films illustrate a range of challenging clinical situations in CAT, requiring skilled therapist responses. The films themselves are complete, thanks to the efforts of director Kathryn Pemberton, other Catalyse colleagues involved in developing the materials, and a host of mainly volunteer CAT therapists who played roles of both therapists and clients. The image featured above shows Catalyse graduates Kelly Savery and Sam Hartley having a relaxed moment between takes.

The project was enabled by a grant from Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust’s Endowment Fund. This helped us enlist the excellent technical and creative skills of Brickoven Media. We are currently working on the supporting materials and hope to make this package available soon.

In the meantime, and in time for ICATA’s conference in Helsinki between 15 and 17 June, we’ve produced some updated fliers to share. Feel free to print these off and share them in your networks, services and courses.

CAT Training Films Series 1 Flier June 2023Download
Advanced Skills in CAT Flier June 2023Download