BACP supervision requirements for trainees, in plain English

The two numbers that matter

BACP's published supervision guidance sets a minimum of 1.5 hours of supervision per calendar month, regardless of how many clients you have. Trainees on BACP-accredited courses also need one hour of supervision for every eight hours of client work, with supervision taking place every two weeks. Both apply at once: a quiet month still needs its 1.5 hours, and a busy one can need more than that to keep the ratio.

The calendar-month trap

The minimum runs per calendar month, not every four or five weeks, and BACP says so explicitly. This is the rule that quietly catches people out: supervision on 30 May and again on 1 July leaves June with no supervision at all, even though the sessions were only four and a half weeks apart. If you saw clients in June, that gap is a compliance problem you cannot fix retrospectively, because supervision cannot be backdated. When you book supervision, check the booking lands in the month that needs it.

How group supervision is counted

Time attended is not the same as time you can claim. Under BACP's published rule, a group of up to four members can each claim half the session time. In a group of five or more, the session time is divided equally between members.

• A two-hour group with four members: each member claims one hour.
• A two-hour group with six members: each member claims 20 minutes.
• Notice that neither example reaches the 1.5-hour monthly minimum on its own: the four-member group leaves each member 30 minutes short, the six-member group 70 minutes short. A monthly group session usually needs topping up with more supervision in that same calendar month.

One more published detail: supervision conducted by text-based methods does not count toward the monthly time.

What this means for your records

Courses and professional bodies ask for evidence months or years after the sessions happened, and BACP can audit practising members' supervision arrangements later in their careers. So log every client session and every supervision session as you go, per calendar month, recording group sizes so claimable time can be worked out, and never write client names in your log; use short client codes instead. If you keep your log as a spreadsheet, our free hours log template does all of this by design.

Sources

BACP, "Supervision" (bacp.co.uk/membership/supervision) and BACP's Register guide to supervision (bacp.co.uk/membership/registered-membership/guide-to-supervision), both checked 3 August 2026. This page summarises published guidance for trainees; it is not advice from BACP, and the current published criteria always take precedence.