News Updates

The Cabinet Office Social Exclusion Task Force Report Jan 08

'Thinking Family' in delivering services to 'families at risk'

To all Trainining Institutes - re. Higher Education Funding

Dear Colleagues,

Some of you will already be aware of the worrying threat to funding for
family therapy training courses. Courses run within universities will
attract Higher Education Funding for each of the students studying on the course. This allows universities to charge a much lower fee as it acts as a subsidy. The government is being asked by HEFCE to stop funding places at an equivalent or lower level to previous study. This means that many of our students who already have a masters or even clinical doctorate degree will not get funding and the cost of courses will soar and make most not viable. There is space in the proposal for exceptions and I think we need to make as big a protest as possible and ask that therapy courses because they are"health related" are exempt from the proposal. We may also feel strongly about the general principal of the funding cut but this email to to ask you to protest by responding personally to the consultation by Dec 7th and alerting your college, university or institute to this proposal and the threat to therapy training. Even if currently your course does not attract HEFCE funding you may want this in the future so please join us in this protest.
This proposal has crept up and only recently come to the notice of AFT and other organisations but it has very negative implications.

View the letter from John Denham at

www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2007/HEFCE_letterELQ.pdf

for more information www.hefce.ac.uk

Kind regards

AFT Board

AFT: current practice, future possibilities'. September 2007.
An overview of the work of AFT and its members, requested by and submitted to UK Government departments, including the Cabinet Office (Social Exclusion Task Force) and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (Time to Talk
consultation)I