Dr Trisha Waters

Author, Founding Director of CTSW & Lead Trainer

B Sc, Cert Ed, MA(Ed), Dip Psych., PhD

Trisha is the author of this online manual and the lead trainer for Setting Up Therapeutic Storywriting Groups. She is the founding Director of the Centre for Therapeutic Storywriting.

She previously led a 2 year project Supporting Emotional Wellbeing in Schools, funded by the TDA (DfE) for the charity YoungMinds.

She was senior lecturer in SEN & Inclusion at the University of Chichester.  She has worked for many years in special and mainstream schools, both as a teacher and an educational therapist, and is committed to developing work in the field of therapeutic teaching.

She is the author of Therapeutic Storywriting (publ. David Fulton 2004) and an experienced educational trainer in the field of behaviour management, emotional literacy, SEN and inclusion. Her doctoral research at University of Southampton was into the relationship between emotional and cognitive learning.

With the support of  the South-east Region SEN Partnership (SERSEN),  Trisha  developed the Therapeutic Storywriting Groups model  which  has now been used in over 500 schools in England. Trisha then developed the Story Links model and led the 20 month Story Links project funded by Esmee Fairbairn foundation and the TDA.

After graduating from Sussex University with a degree in Logic and Modern Physics, Trisha completed her PGCE and began her teaching career in a residential therapeutic community school for boys with severe emotional and behavioural diificulties. She later worked as a classteacher and senior manager in an inner London primary school before moving to Brighton where she worked as a SENCO in a large junior school.

While in London she trained as a counsellor and therapist at the Psychosynthesis and Education Trust where her training placement was with the school based counselling organisation The Place To Be. She later gained an MA in Therapeutic Interventions in Primary Schools from Sussex University. She supervises counsellors working in schools, having completed her training in supervision at the British Association of Psychotherapists.

With the support of a BPRS  grant Trisha wrote and taught the course on Educational Counselling and Therapeutic Teaching at Crawley College. She was a member of the SEN Committee responsible for writing the SEN policy for Brighton & Hove and co-wrote the Brighton & Hove policy for Counselling in Primary Schools.

Trisha’s  PhD thesis (Southampton) was on The Use of Therapeutic Storywriting to support Pupils with Behavioural, Emotional and Social Difficulties

View Dr. Trisha Waters’s Recent Publications