To set up a crowd fund to pay for my post graduate degree?

[Spiceupyourlife1989]

I don’t have the funds to pay it and am currently living on a low income, topped up by universal credit.
I know the post grad loans are £11,500 or thereabouts, but that’s to pay for course fees AND to live on without help, I won’t be able to do it. I want to improve my job prospects, specifically for my toddler son, who I don’t want to end up going without, particularly when he starts school.

Theres a lot of really weird and blinkered responses on here, not necessarily about the crowd funder but about why you might find a second degree useful, the sort of jobs you might get with a sociology degree and no specific experience, and how obviously if you have a degree and are still on a relatively low wage you just aren’t trying hard enough.

Ignore them op, but do think and talk through your options, of which there are a good few.

Can you find other routes to getting more experience? Working/volunteering with charities? Can you read up on the subject in depth to gain more of an education rather than qualification? How do you think that a MA would lead to a better job? Are you sure that it would? Are there other routes? I.e. working for the council in a relevant area and then seeing if they will fund/support a masters whilst on the job?

Would it be worth trying to reframe this and think over a longer period of time? If you have a young child I'm assuming you are likely to be under 40? I'm in my 50s and many people I know have retrained and changed career over the last 15-20 years, sometimes more than once. One of my friends is doing a social work postgrad, another is about to retrain as a teacher. It's far more common now to have older people starting new careers, so it might be more practical to think of play therapy as a longer term goal, and think more about what you can do short term that's a more secure income, but also look at ways of gaining relevant experience.

I work with adults who have LD and MH conditions.

Why not try and get some experience in that field? Coupled with your experience with children that would really help.

Larger companies like Priory Group will take people with no experience. You can work on a bank basis too so pick your shift to suit you. I worked there previously and its tough work but the training is okay.

İ would suggest you could volunteer in places like the children's centre and mental health organisations if that's what you'd like to gain experience in. Even if you just do once a week, it will help open doors for you, eventually. Could you look for some kind of affordable diploma online in play therapy or similar and then use that to set up something independently, alongside your part time job? I'm sure your toddler gets all the love he needs from you and you can always sell bits on eBay or do other extra little casual jobs here and there when you need to pay out for things as he gets older. İf you're on benefits have you got the water bill reduction and council tax reduction in place? As well as this you can apply every year for a 140 pounds discount on your gas or electric bill in August through the warm home discount. İt all helps.

Don’t teach if you don’t want to as it’s not fair on the children. They deserve better.

I don’t think a masters is the way to go. It’s just putting off the day you need to make a career. I work with lots of social workers. Very good ones. Very few have masters.

Can you try to find someone to mentor you? Or maybe just take a job when if it’s not the one you want. The crowdfunding idea will just is not for this.

whose going to pay?

Most people dont understand how crowd funding works

• Next to no money actually comes from stangers
• to get any money from strangers you need a legit heart wrenching charity cause or a good business plan
• Its a full time job - you have to constantly promote, market and beg the full run time

Crowd funding statistic show you have the make the first 20% from friends and family before stangers will even click on to read your page usually.

Crowd funding stats also show appart from very rare viral hits most standard crowd funders fail unless the page owners promote it as their full time job for the full month of being open (a month yields the most success).

Most crowd funders make no money because people think they just put up a page and strangers will give you money, it never works like that.

@Spiceupyourlife1989

I don’t have the funds to pay it and am currently living on a low income, topped up by universal credit. I know the post grad loans are £11,500 or thereabouts, but that’s to pay for course fees AND to live on without help, I won’t be able to do it. I want to improve my job prospects, specifically for my toddler son, who I don’t want to end up going without, particularly when he starts school.

Surely this isn't a real post

Some good ideas on this thread. With a child to support you need to balance looking after your child and earning money. Play therapy is low paid and the qualification expensive. Avoid online qualifications. I would think about looking for a job with better promotion prospects/ wfh options - using your existing degree (as an indicator of your academic ability). You want to be looking at earning rather than spending money.

@Spiceupyourlife1989

Kind of wish I hadn’t posted this now, feeling bad about myself. I do have anxiety and depression, which has caused me to leave jobs in the past and I had PND.

Mostly I feel stuck in a rut as I applied to be a TA for experience so that I could do my PGCE at a later date. Then I ended up staying in the role in various schools for 7/8 years. Now that’s my only experience.

That's on you then, isn't it? Why should others pay for you when you haven't got the drive to chase for what you want yourself?

As others have said, look at the social work degree.

CAMHS employ social workers and I know they certainly used to provide training in play therapy and other approaches.

@LadyMacbethWasMisunderstood

Don’t teach if you don’t want to as it’s not fair on the children. They deserve better.

I don’t think a masters is the way to go. It’s just putting off the day you need to make a career. I work with lots of social workers. Very good ones. Very few have masters.

Can you try to find someone to mentor you? Or maybe just take a job when if it’s not the one you want. The crowdfunding idea will just is not for this.

With a sociology degree already OP would have to do the social work Masters if she wanted to be a social worker.

I wouldn't contribute as my own further education cost me 20k...but also I think the chances of a career as a play therapist in the current climate are extremely remote.
I think you would end up with a useless masters degree that you'll never really use.

@Spiceupyourlife1989 My friend who was an experienced SEND TA got a job as an EMHP.

Postgraduate training is offered as part of the job.

www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/psychological-therapies/roles-psychological-therapies/education-mental-health-practitioner

I don’t know what area you live in OP.

I was going to train as a teacher but decided that actually my heart just wasn’t in it. I had lots of experience with children already from working in language programs abroad though and at a U.K. nursery, so I became a nanny. It can be long hours and no benefit of long holidays obviously but I earn far more now than I would as a teacher (about £44,000 a year plus overtime on top, bonus etc) I have earnt a lot more with families from Russia or the UAE but these have to be short term jobs as they are very intense and not compatible with having a life of your own.

I am about to have my first child though so will have to see what I can juggle. It’s possible I can take him with me some of the week, although I will take a hit in my pay for that. I use LOADS of educational stuff in my job, art, drama /role play etc, homeschooling this year and last year obviously.

I’m not saying it’s for everyone as I get a lot of comments that I’m ‘not using my brain’ (I can assure you I am) but it terms of job security and salary it’s great, I can always enrich my studies for fun if I choose to.

Does definitely depend on the area you live in though. Very common to have a higher earning educated nanny in London/south east, not so much other places.

Some careers advice may come in useful. This is offered free by your local careers office - many also do phone consultations.

If you're looking for job security and good pay, play therapy may not be ideal. Would you consider some of the allied professions eg speech therapy, occupational therapy, social work, physiotherapy, educational psychology...? With all of these careers you would need a master's but these would be funded and there would be guaranteed permanent jobs at the end.

You have missed the application deadlines for entry this year but if you start thinking now and perhaps volunteering a bit, you would be ready to apply for next year's intake. Where abouts in the country are you?

I know how you feel OP, I’d love to do my masters to improve my life for myself and DC (totally unrelated field to degree) but I can’t afford it. People have had their education fully funded by crowdfunding. Some people have had some ridiculous things funded by crowdfunding, so you could give it a shot for sure. But I don’t know how successful you will be. Can you look into loans that you pay back after you’ve finished? Or sponsorship/grants/burseries? There is sometimes funding available

@LadyMacbethWasMisunderstood

Don’t teach if you don’t want to as it’s not fair on the children. They deserve better.

I don’t think a masters is the way to go. It’s just putting off the day you need to make a career. I work with lots of social workers. Very good ones. Very few have masters.

Can you try to find someone to mentor you? Or maybe just take a job when if it’s not the one you want. The crowdfunding idea will just is not for this.

But the OP would need a masters to be a social worker as she already has an undergraduate degree.

A play therapist doesn’t earn a great deal. I’ve employed them in school and we’ve not paid them more than a HLTA would be paid.
Don’t do teaching if you don’t have a passion for it.
How about Social Work? Or look at jobs that you train for whilst being employed?

You don't need a masters degree. If your current degree and 'lack of experience' (I'll come back to this) don't get you a job, a masters degree won't help.

However I think you don't advertise yourself well in cvs. Get help on your cv, you have a lot of experience dealing with children already from your ta job. You can word that in ways to show you have experience to get a play therapist job.

You don't need a masters degree. If your current degree and 'lack of experience' (I'll come back to this) don't get you a job, a masters degree won't help

If the OP wants to be a Play Therapist, she needs to do a Play Therapy Masters which she can’t afford, that’s why she has posted.

Those of us working in schools who have employed Play Therapists, are saying that the job isn’t very well paid and hard to earn a full time so wouldn’t recommend it. That doesn’t remove the fact that a Masters is necessary for the job she wants though.

I think you’d be better off getting some counselling/therapy for your anxiety and confidence to be honest. It sounds like that’s what’s really holding you back.

You could try a crowd finder of course, but I don’t think it’s a realistic way to cover the costs, so you’d need to find other options too.

@BlackSwan

You think you need a masters in play therapy? That's the most mickey mouse course I have ever heard of. Incidentally I found play therapists fairly useless when my DS was undergoing serious surgery & treatment ... perhaps they lacked formal qualifications but all they seemed to do was hold up a Where's Wally book while the needle went in.

You're talking about play specialists, not play therapists. Do you think that Art Therapy, Drama Therapy and Music Therapy are also 'mickey mouse' courses? Another poster also mentioned Play Therapists being in NHS band 3 - that is also a play specialist or play assistant. BAPT Accredited Play Therapists are also eligible for BACP membership and can get posts as Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists who are at Band 7. There is a lot of misunderstanding on this thread about what a Play Therapist is.

OP have you considered training with PTUK instead of doing a BAPT accredited MA? You can then work alongside and it's a much more affordable route. On the MA you need to be able to pay for your own therapy, your own supervision, all materials for the course etc so the actual cost is much higher than the course fees alone. Most people work while on the course which would just not be possible if you have a young child. This does limit some job opportunities post qualification as a PTUK course does not make you eligible for BACP membership which is often preferred by the NHS.

Incidentally, I do not know any Play Therapists who are struggling to find work, many I know are completely at capacity and turning families away. I'd be happy to talk more about it if you want to pm me.

BAPT Accredited Play Therapists are also eligible for BACP membership and can get posts as Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists who are at Band 7

I sincerely hope that is not true. Play therapists are not qualified to be C&A psychotherapists no matter who accredits them.

Also those who have experienced anxiety and depression are absolutely not ineligible to become therapists, I would go so far as to say that many therapists become therapists partly because of difficult experiences and mental health challenges. It would be VITAL though, to get your own therapy, preferably person-centred/humanistic/integrative, to protect and support your own mental health through what is a challenging training, and challenging career. The highs are high and it is incredibly rewarding but the lows are very low.