A year of change – developing knowledge and new ways of supporting relationships

Published in Blog by Andrew Balfour on November 14th 2023

As we celebrate 75 years of helping couples and individuals to have better relationships, we have revised our organisational vision and ambitions to better reflect TR’s place as the leading exponent of the view that relationships are of fundamental importance to our mental health and wellbeing.

Put succinctly – as per TR’s new strapline – a better world through better relationships.

The demand for couple psychotherapy is high but, sadly, with government funding for relationship support reducing, accessing help is becoming more challenging than ever.

We are working to change this.

Activities and partnerships

Our work can be split into five categories: providing therapy (TR Therapy); training therapists and practitioners (TR Training); undertaking research (TR Research); influencing policy (TR Today); and providing CPD (TR Together).

To reach out to more people, over the last year, we have consciously set out to partner with more organisations including charities, local authorities, the NHS and academic institutions.

Every year we share our knowledge as widely as possible through our many training offers. Last year we trained over 100 therapists, over 1,000 frontline local authority workers and almost 100 NHS staff.

Our new partnership with Birkbeck, University of London, enables trainees to obtain an academic award as well as professional accreditation. As university students, our trainees have access to government-backed student loans and TR teaching staff can use London University’s resources as Honorary Teaching Fellows of Birkbeck.

An inclusive approach

Developing the provision of inclusive relationship support, accessible to the diversity of families in our communities, is a key priority for Tavistock Relationships.

We have continued to pursue our race equality and diversity strategy, challenging ourselves to tackle racism and other forms of bias and discrimination – with the recognition that true change begins at home. Our Diversity Training Bursaries continue to encourage people from a variety of cultural backgrounds to benefit from our world-class teaching.

Reducing parental conflict and working with depression

We are also very proud of our work to reduce the negative impact of parental conflict on children.

The Government has now published the results of its Reducing Parental Conflict programme in which Mentalisation-Based Therapy was found to be highly effective at reducing parental conflict and improving outcomes for children. TR remains at the forefront of research and practice in building the evidence base for this approach.

This year, TR also provided relationship support services to NHS and Social Care staff throughout London (free at the point of delivery). And we trained NHS staff to deliver Couple Therapy for Depression within Talking Therapy Services.

A community-based platform for therapist learning

Another exciting development is the launch of our new CPD platform in September.

TR Together is promoting shared learning experiences among practitioners and interested people from related fields. We hope that by developing events which encourage and support peer relationships across disciplines and professions, we will create a lasting and positive change within the wider mental health community.

New initiatives

TR constantly strives to innovate and we are grateful for grants from the Baily Thomas Trust and the Youth Endowment Fund which have supported our research. In 2022/23 we have also brought new relationship focus to perinatal services.

Although we have faced significant challenges this year, we have responded to them with new initiatives and developments. Buoyed by the opportunities enabled by new partnerships, we enter 2023-24 a stronger, more ambitious charity than ever, committed to ensuring that everyone who needs relationship support, can get the help they need.

We’ll be forging further ahead in our quest to develop new ways of supporting relationships, and we’ll be launching a series of fundraising campaigns to back up our charitable activities.

Read about our impact

Read more about our progress, developments and innovations in our 2022-23 Annual Impact Report.