BACP CPD: keeping a reflective record as a therapist
What BACP expects each year, how the four-stage cycle works, and a short worked example.
What BACP expects
BACP expects registered members to do at least 30 hours of CPD a year, and says that what your CPD achieves matters more than the hours themselves. You are asked to:
- Keep an up-to-date and accurate record of your CPD activities.
- Record a range of activities relevant to your current or future practice.
- Show clearly how you have reflected, planned, actioned and evaluated your development needs.
Supervision is a separate Register requirement, so it is not submitted as CPD. It is, though, a good place to talk through what your CPD should be.
The four-stage cycle
- Reflect: where is your practice now, and what do you need to develop?
- Plan: what will you do about it, and in what order?
- Action: what you actually did.
- Evaluate: what it changed for your practice and your clients.
If you are picked for audit
BACP audits a sample of registered members. If you are selected you have around six weeks to send in your CPD records, so a record kept month by month saves a scramble later.
A short worked example
Reflect: several of my clients this year have been recently bereaved, and I noticed I was leaning on one familiar model of grief.
Plan: a one-day workshop on contemporary approaches to bereavement, plus reading, discussed first in supervision.
Action: I attended the workshop in March and read two of the recommended papers.
Evaluate: I am less quick to look for stages and more able to stay with how each client is actually grieving. One client told me they felt less hurried.
Keep it anonymous
Do not include anything that could identify a client. Remove names, places and identifying detail, and reflect on what you learned rather than on who was involved.
Record your CPD by speaking
ReflectReady has BACP templates for planning your CPD and for recording an activity. You talk it through in your own words and it sorts them under the headings, ready to read, edit and keep. The AI only sorts your words, it never writes them. Free to try.
Sources: BACP: guide to CPD for registered members.
More guides
- Gibbs reflective cycle: a worked example
- Kolb reflective cycle explained, with an example
- Driscoll’s model of reflection: What? So what? Now what?
- Gibbs, Kolb or Driscoll: which reflective model should you use?
- NMC reflective account: what to include, with an example
- Linking a reflective account to the Code, with an example for each theme
- NMC reflective discussion: what happens, and what goes on the form
- An app for NMC revalidation reflections: what it can and cannot do
- Student nurse placement reflection: a worked example
- Social Work England CPD: a reflective record example
- Social Work England peer reflection: a worked example
- Social Work England CPD deadline: what to record by 30 November
- HCPC CPD: what to record and how to reflect
- BACP CPD: keeping a reflective record as a therapist
- BABCP Reflective Statement: what to write, with an example
- Can I use AI for my reflective account?