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Home / Accreditation for the Online Diploma

The Online Diploma results in exactly the same qualification as the live in person or the webcast diploma formats:

  1. You will be able to get insurance and open your own practice. 
  2. You will be able to join a number of professional hypnotherapy organisations (see point 5)
  3. The Diploma is the only hypnotherapy qualification in the UK to be accredited by the government-regulated, national awarding body NCFE.
  4. All formats of the Diploma are approved by The British Psychological Society Learning Centre as CPD for registered psychologists.
  5. You will be able to become a member of FHT, ACCPH, IHA, ASCH, ICBCH and REBHP (see below for more information about these).

Accreditation from NCFE

NCFE is a government-regulating, national awarding body. The Diploma in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy is accredited by NCFE as a customised award equivalent to Level 4 on the National Qualifications Framework (customised award no. C0982).

NCFE is not concerned with whether you had face-to-face classroom/webcast training hours or whether you had one-to-one tutoring hours over the internet. The assessment for the qualification is concerned with whether you have met the learning outcomes for that qualification, which are set against the National Occupational Skills for Hypnotherapy.

This is probably the most important point of accreditation as by this you can be assured of the quality in terms of training delivered and assessment of work.

We are the only hypnotherapy training organisation in the UK to develop our own externally verified, customised award (we don’t print off our own Diplomas!).

You can read more about the NCFE accreditation here. 

British Psychological Society Learning Centre Approval

All formats of the Diploma are approved by The British Psychological Society Learning Centre as CPD for registered psychologists.

The BPS Learning Centre Approved logo can be found where a programme or event has met their standards. The logo is used in conjunction with the statement: Approved by the British Psychological Society Learning Centre for the purposes of Continuing Professional Development (CPD). 

The BPS approval Scheme is outlined here. 

Taking a BPS Approved Course does not confer membership of the BPS, and it does not mean you can represent yourself as being a psychologist or a therapist who has been approved by the BPS. You cannot display the BPS logo on your website directly. However you can display your Certificate of Attendance or Qualification Certificate that has the BPS logo on it.

It is a very good “kitemark” (indicator) of quality.

Professional membership options for the Online Diploma

FHT – Federation of Holistic Therapists 

FHT is an Accredited Register with the PSA (Professional Standards Authority), and is the UK's largest professional association for therapists, ensuring high standards in therapy education and practice since 1962.

FHT supports and educates its membership community to be professional and successful therapists in a rapidly changing world.

ACCPH – Accredited Counsellors, Coaches, Psychotherapists and Hypnotherapists

ACCPH is an independent professional body and register for counsellors, coaches, psychotherapists and hypnotherapists. 

ACCPH aims to serve: 

Professionals who hold recognised qualifications completed by blended and home distance learning. These being of a specific nationally recognised standard. 

Professionals who hold recognised qualifications from attending a course over a period of time. 

Members of the public and businesses who use it are looking for a qualified counsellor, coach , psychotherapist or hypnotherapist. 

REBHP – The Register for Evidence-Based Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy

REBHP was setup in 2010 by Mark R. Davis and Donald Robertson, has a separate division of the College, which allowed hypnotherapists to have a professional registration that distinguished them as evidence-based practitioners, from the many hypnotherapists who pay no attention to the evidence-base for hypnosis and psychotherapy.

A key feature is free subscription to The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, the leading academic journal on hypnosis.

REBHP has uniquely negotiated online access to the entire 60 year archive of IJCEH articles. A fantastic resource for hypnotherapists.

NO professional membership is required to practise as a hypnotherapist.

There are no legal requirements to join one of these organisations. You can set up your practice without being a member of any of these organisations.

None of these organisations will ensure your success in your business – and the impact of membership is relatively small (or negligible) in the scheme of things.

However, we strongly recommend that you get insurance and join a professional organisation. Which professional membership organisation you join is not really that important.

Question: What about membership to other organisations such as GHR or NCH?

GHR and NCH require a live training (either in person or by webcast) for professional membership. These organisations have a requirement for 120 simultaneous contact hours between trainer and learner.
Both GHR and NCH accept the 120 contact hours can be via Zoom rather than in person.

Unfortunately CNHC have reverted to the pre-pandemic position that all contact hours must be in person – this is despite nearly two years where training schools successfully implemented online live training – and despite that fact that many people still do not consider the pandemic over and would avoid a course (like ours) where you spend 7 consecutive days in a room with people from all over the world.

Fortunately NCH and GHR have not followed CNCH in reverting back to hypnotherapy training needing to be in person.

Clearly with the Covid-19 pandemic there has been a huge shift to online therapy – which is proven to be very effective, in some cases more effective, than in person therapy. These organisations have been supporting online therapy and so the requirement for in person training is an anachronistic requirement – and we expect them to change their policy in due time.

A number of meta-analyses (studies of studies) have concluded clearly and robustly that online therapy is just as effective as in person therapy. This is especially true for cognitive behavioural therapy.

Our view on the 120 “contact hours” requirement

Our view is that these requirements are out of date, restrictive and even discriminate against those who have dependants.  

We make this claim as an experienced and professional adult educational organisation which operates to higher standards than most of the rest of the field.

(We have developed our own externally verified qualification, we adhere to an evidence-based approach, a strong scientific scepticism and our training is approved by two national psychological organisations – The British Psychological Society and The Chinese Psychological Society.)

Having “120 contact hours” assures no particular standards or quality. In many cases you may spend 120 contact hours in someone’s living room with 5 other students and a “trainer” who until 12 months ago was running a pub (for example – but that is actually a real example!)

The value of a sound and professional training is not the collection of logos the therapist feels entitled to display, but whether he or she is competent in the use of effective and compassionate methods, to make sure that ‘hypnotherapy works’ for the client.”

Anna Powell, Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapist

Our experience as a training organisation

The UK College has been running the Diploma in CBH training programme since 2003. Typically we run three diploma training programmes a year in the UK and now two programmes a year in China. Since the programme was established we have trained over 1000 students  – and run the entire programme over 45 times. Educational professionals who take our training are deeply impressed at the standard of the training.

We do understand the concerns that “online therapy training” will lower standards – however we have taken the utmost effort to apply our in-depth knowledge and experience of training to ensure that the Online Diploma training is equivalent to the classroom or webcast training in all possible ways.

We strongly believe that the Online Diploma is an equivalent training to the Diploma taught in ‘simultaneous learning’ environments.

The impact of COVID-19 on training and working conditions

Since the start of the pandemic, we have been lobbying CNCH, NCH and GHR further to relax their ‘classroom hours’/’simultaneous electronic presence’ requirement.

We feel that these organisations should show flexibility during this crisis in order to allow those training who are concerned about these particular memberships to not be impeded in their plans to take a hypnotherapy training.

This particularly applies to those who may have parenting or caring responsibilities during this time – and so cannot commit to training with ‘simultaneous electronic presence’.

Moreover, it is clear, through any process of reflection, that the prime requirement should be on the rigour of the assessment process – and that being either in the classroom or simultaneously online with a trainer does not really provide any particular guarantee of the quality of training and learning experience.

Indeed our own process of exploring this has shown that some learners are inhibited in their learning process due to the presence of charismatic trainers or other learners who dominate classroom discussion.

In particular, it is now clear that effective therapy and hypnotherapy can be done online, at a distance/remotely.  If clients can engage in therapy, learn and change via online sessions, then the same clearly applies to those who are learning therapy. This is particularly true when the therapy model focuses primarily on psycho-education and learning coping skills (rather than relying on transference as being the mechanism of change, for example).

Considering the long-term impacts of the current pandemic on working patterns, we want to encourage people to get on board with the extensive opportunities of remote learning – for you and, most importantly, for those who you will provide your services to.

No amount of certificates, logos or accredited memberships can make your therapy business a success!

In terms of running a successful business, it is far more important that a prospective hypnotherapist chooses a training course that they will resonate with and which will give them the confidence and skills to be successful.

No amount of certificates, logos or accredited memberships can make you a skilled and effective therapist.

Developing true confidence and an established skillset that allows you to problem-solve creatively and help with a wide range of client issues will have far more business impact than a narrow skillset and moderate confidence but “the right memberships.”

BUT – don’t take our word for it! We asked 30 practising hypnotherapists what they thought.


Finally, it is really worth carefully reading this in-depth comment from Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapist Anna Powell who has been a practising hypnotherapist for many years and retrained with us in 2017. Anna made the following statement about how membership to professional organisations has impacted her business.

“Evidently Mark and the UKCHH team are working hard to make sure that the online training is a valid and equal alternative [to live classroom training, as inevitable and necessary for our time as online therapy itself; and if anyone can do it, he can.

Thirty years ago, when I was living in remote Cornwall, stuck at home with children to look after, and with no internet then or access to any other form of training in hypnotherapy, I gained my first diploma through a ‘mail order’ course, consisting of a photocopied text and a set of audio cassettes. It was an unregulated course, and eventually was rightly discredited. But it was above all accessible, and it enabled many geographically isolated people to start a career using hypnosis to help people.

Since those maverick days, there has been a concerted drive by hypnotherapists to work to professional standards. And now we have have come full circle. Now we have a whole new technology, a great deal of scientific research and measurable evidence, and a pressing new social and global need to work together but separately. Even so subtle an interchange as hypnosis is being taught remotely again. At least this time it is to a rigorously academic and professional level.

The professional organisations will have to rethink their conditions to suit the changing ways we work. Although they supposedly offer a service to hypnotherapists and an assurance to clients, I have found them of no use whatever on either count. Clients find me by online searches, word of mouth, or through reading my articles. Not one has ever applied to me after looking at the websites of GHR, CNHC or any other professional organisation. Most people do not know they exist, or what they do or what their logos stand for. A newly qualified hypnotherapist, who has already paid for a sound, evidence-based training like that of the UKCHH, will dutifully go on to pay annual subscriptions to these institutions before they have even begun earning any income from their new profession. It is their subscriptions that enable the institutions to run at all, but they get very little practical benefit in exchange, and their clients do not even know that their interests are being protected.

As moral support, and above all for upholding (in principle at least) professionalism in hypnotherapy, these organisations play an important and respected role, but it is a limited one. As far as the general population is concerned, they are mostly irrelevant. Not one client has ever asked me if I was a member of a professional organisation, or whether the logos on my website actually meant anything. In fact, clients do not even ask me about my training and qualifications. What they want to know is whether I can help them with their problem. When they go away satisfied, they say ‘Hypnotherapy worked for me.’ The value of a sound and professional training is not the collection of logos the therapist feels entitled to display, but whether he or she is competent in the use of effective and compassionate methods, to make sure that ‘hypnotherapy works’ for the client.”

Anna Powell, Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapist

We hope that that clarifies the membership options and accreditation of the Online Diploma. You can read more about our Contact Hours Calculator here.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to get in touch. You can email enquiries@ukhypnosis.com or call us directly on 0207 112 9040.