Training & Consultancy

We offer training and consultancy to individuals and organisations who want to grow their capacity to facilitate therapeutic groups in a range of contexts.

We currently provide the following practice-based courses.

Introduction to Therapeutic Groupwork – A 2-day course. This course takes place regularly in London and can also be delivered in-house to your team.

Building Blocks – An 8-day Intermediate Groupwork Training. This course takes place at our premises in London.

Our training is experiential, participatory and grounded in theory and research. We also provide consultancy on groupwork interventions, design, training and supervision.

The course was fantastic - one of the best CPDs I've ever done.
Thank you for holding the space I appreciate your years of experience and enjoyed your style.
I was very impressed by the way the trainer modelled the skills/tools implicitly through his facilitation of the group as well as teaching them explicitly through great use of powerpoint slides.
I came away feeling much better-equipped to run groups in a therapeutic setting.

Our approach to therapeutic group facilitation was first developed by Dr Alfred Hurst and Tim Foskett over two decades from the mid-1990s, when they led and devised a London-wide, NHS-funded, therapeutic groupwork service for gay and bi men at PACE (the largest LGBT mental health charity in London at that time). The clinical supervisor for the project was Gaie Houston.

Over 19 years the project delivered more than 10,000 hours of therapeutic groupwork and worked with over 5000 men, in a variety of short-term therapeutic groupwork formats. Diversity and inclusion were cornerstones of the program and, by design, the project disproportionately served Black and Asian men and HIV positive men. You can read more about this work and the outcome research here.

Our approach draws from humanistic, integrative, psychodynamic, psycho-educational and systems theories. It is pragmatic in nature and can be applied within a wide range of therapeutic settings.

Dr Alfred Hurst is a family and systemic psychotherapist and clinical supervisor with over 40 years experience. He has worked creatively in a number of settings including child protection, psychosexual drugs, alcohol, sexual compulsivity, sexuality and mental health settings. He holds a Doctorate from the Tavistock Clinic in Systemic Psychotherapy and is a director of North London Group Therapy.

Tim Foskett is a group psychotherapist who has been working extensively with groups for over 30 years in a range of different contexts. He trained at City University, PHYSIS and Spectrum, within a Humanistic - Integrative framework, and more recently has been studying Modern Analytic Group Therapy with the Center for Group Studies in New York. He is a director of North London Group Therapy.

Anup Karia has worked for many years in the fields of trauma, mental health, HIV/AIDS and with refugees and people seeking asylum in the UK. He is a co-founder of Asta Facilitation through which he work with groups and organisations and facilitate multicultural forums in Europe. He is a faculty member and senior trainer in the UK Process Work School, and is a member of UKCP.

Gaie Houston first studied group behaviour with the National Training Laboratories in the United States and has been one of the UK’s foremost proponents of work in groups throughout her long career. She is Emeritus Advisor to the Gestalt Centre in London, and has written extensively on group facilitation and group therapy.