Art therapist at Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust

The job at Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust

Art therapists use drawing, painting, sculpture and other visual media as the main means of communication in a therapeutic relationship. Rather than teaching art, they help people explore feelings that are hard to put into words, working towards agreed aims over a series of individual or group sessions. Day to day this means assessing referrals, setting up a consistent studio space, holding difficult material safely, keeping clinical records, attending clinical supervision and feeding back to multidisciplinary teams. Children, young people, adults and older people living with mental health difficulties, trauma, learning disabilities, neurodivergence, dementia, life-limiting illness or emotional and behavioural difficulties.

At a mental health trust such as Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, that work means a mental health caseload across inpatient units, community mental health teams, crisis services and, in most organisations, child and adolescent and secure services. Rotations here tend to move between inpatient and community teams rather than between body systems, and supervision arrangements matter more than in almost any other setting. Across the profession as a whole, art therapists work in settings including NHS mental health trust, NHS acute trust, community mental health team, child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) and mainstream and special schools — an organisation of this type will run some of those services and not others, which is why two posts with the same job title in the same city can be very different jobs.

Pay is not an employer decision. Agenda for Change is negotiated nationally and set separately in each of the four nations, so Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust pays band 6 exactly what every other NHS employer in England pays it: £39,959 at the bottom of the band on the 2026/27 scale. For context, median full-time pay across all occupations in the North West was £37,361 in 2025. What genuinely differs between two employers is the caseload, how rotations are structured, how much protected time you get for supervision and continuing professional development, how much band 6 progression is built into the establishment, and how far you travel between sites. Those are the questions worth asking at interview.