BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BRIGHTON FOUNDATION COURSE:

The IGA Brighton Foundation Course in Group Analysis has a thirty year history of introducing students to the theory and experience of group analysis. Students have come from a wide variety of professional fields including social work, mental health, teaching, housing, organisational consulting. The course was instituted in 1991 under the auspices of Group Analysis South East and accredited by the Institute of Group Analysis as meeting the national requirements for Introductory Courses (as they were then named). 

Completing a Foundation Course has always been an essential requirement for applying to the IGA Qualifying Course and, over the years, many Brighton graduates have gone on to become fully trained Group Analysts and registered as psychotherapists with the UKCP, often then working within the NHS. 

Up until 2018, the course was structured as a weekly course over three ten week terms and the main format consisted of a theory lecture followed by a 90 minute experiential group, conducted by qualified group analysts. However, each term two lectures were replaced by ‘work discussion groups’ which enabled students to apply their learning to their respective workplace settings through consideration of team dynamics or of a therapeutic group they were running. In the summer term, six lectures were replaced by a ‘large group experience’ by combining the two or three small groups together; these were particularly valued for the insight it provides into organisational dynamics. 

The Brighton Foundation Course has run on a yearly basis since 1991 with a short hiatus of three years prior to the weekend block course being developed in ??2021. The course was based first in a mental health day centre in Lewes, then at Sussex University and subsequently at Community Base in central Brighton before its relocation to the current setting. 

During the early years of the course, the majority of the students were sponsored by their employing bodies but increasingly, as the NHS and local authorities underwent budgetary cuts and reduced spending on training and continuing professional development, students increasingly had to self-fund and this has now become the norm. For a few years, the affiliation of the IGA to a university enabled students to acquire academic credits awards a Masters Degree if they undertook the additional work of three essays but this was discontinued when universities raised fees to a level that was uneconomic.

The influence of the course in the Sussex, Kent and Surrey area was widespread with up to 20-30 students attending per year and most students would apply on the basis of having had the course recommended to them by colleagues or their managers who had themselves experienced its benefits. The consistent feedback from evaluations over the years was that the experiential learning was invaluable for making sense of the theory and through the membership of a small group which necessarily went through the forming, storming, norming, performing and mourning developmental stages over its thirty week life. 

At the personal level, many students reported gains from learning to communicate more effectively in teams and organisational settings and developed insight to their valencies for particular ‘roles’ in groups. Some students had positions where their learning could be directly applied to therapeutic groups they were setting up or already running. But commonly students also noted the therapeutic effects for themselves of ‘free speech’ within a safe small group setting where they could experience transferential and projective processes in action and receive honest feedback from other group members. Intrinsic to this learning is the discovery of the ’social matrix’ within which our minds and behaviours have been shaped by our families of origin, our experiences as social beings across the lifespan and by the wider culture.