Educational Psychology - Guidelines for Schools

Educational Psychology | Meet the Team  | The Working Process  | Guidelines for Schools | Mediation

The psychological service has a clear duty to carry out work with individual children and young people. However a purely casework style of service delivery can fail to use the expertise and time of the psychologist to best effect. The service is able to make a distinctive contribution to the development of educational policy and practice both at school and authority level which can represent a more efficient alternative to casework for both psychologists and schools.

Modes of service delivery - policy and practice

Schools continually and systematically identify areas for quality development. Any development related to learning or behaviour has a psychological component and could therefore be enhanced be a well planned contribution from the psychological service. There are also developments that fall clearly within well researched areas familiar to educational psychologists. Equally, concern about an individual child can encourage schools and psychologists to think about wider issues.

There are three main modes of service delivery where psychologists can work alongside schools to address wider issues: 

• consultation about effective strategies
• staff development
• action research

Procedures for involving the psychologist

Your school psychologist will be happy to discuss any of these approaches with you. Obvious points at which they can be discussed are when work for the session is being planned or where an individual or a group of young people raises a wider issue.

Any plan to carry out a piece of work should be minuted, even if it is relatively small scale and the minute is brief and informal. It is equally important to sit down at the end of any intervention and reflect on how effective it has been and what lessons can be learned for the future. In larger scale interventions specific evaluation measures may be built in. Documentation is doubly important here because well defined information about what works and what does not can be great value to others facing similar issues.

Modes of service provision - individual pupils

The fact that a child cases serious concern in school does not mean that involving the psychologist is essential.

A key guiding principle should always be that of arranging the least intrusive level of intervention which has the potential to be effective.

The psychological service works in the context of the education authority's staged intervention process. The first stage of this is intervention at school level by class teachers in conjunction with promoted and support staff. In most cases the next stage is the involvement of the network support team.

The psychologist will always be used to best effect if there is clear information about the child and what support has been put in place to date.

Indirect Work

Teachers have always used psychologists as consultants about pupils who concern them and about wider issues. Such discussions are a helpful and economical use of time and they do not need to be made formal. However, there is also value in consulting with the psychologist more formally. Often schools do not need more information about the nature or extent of a pupil's strengths and weaknesses in either the educational or behavioural areas. What they do need is help with developing effective strategies to work with them.

The psychologist can work with parents, a teacher, a group of teachers, staff from other agencies or any combination of these whether or not there has been direct contact between any child and the psychologist. The psychologist will participate in and jointly facilitate efforts to generate positive change.

Procedures

Through discussion the psychologist will clarify who should be involved in the consultation. A time and a venue should be fixed. Both must allow the task to be approached seriously; ten minutes at the teachers desk while he or she has a class will not allow much work to take place. regular meetings such as joint support teams are a major opportunity for this sort of work. A note of the consultation must be kept with a record of the discussion and any proposed action by any of the participants. Almost invariably it will be helpful to arrange a follow up review meeting.

Pupils who are discussed in this way are not automatically considered to be referred to the psychological service. Parents may or may not be involved in the process. This is a matter for judgement about the nature and extent of the consultation.

Direct work with individuals

Direct contact with the psychologist is normally a later stage in a process in which a variety of strategies have been well explored. However a number of children come to school with identified additional support needs and are already known to the service. Continued involvement of the service should still be carefully planned.

Clarity of purpose and a common understanding of what the service can offer are essential if direct contact with the psychologist is to lead to effective action. The procedure outlined below is designed to meet these two objectives.