VIDEO 1: PSYCHOLOGY CAREER PATHWAYS: EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST

How do you become an Educational Psychologist?

Dr. Angie Wigford: You become an Educational Psychologist with a Psychology degree that cons
that has the graduate basis for registration from the British Psychological Society. You also need
experience with children, and I was previously a teacher, so I qualified as a teacher, but you don’t
need that qualification anymore.

Dr. Ian Smillie: So, for me was via a series of jobs which were focused on working with children
and families which helped to kind of get the experience I needed, really.

Dr. Angie Wigford: And then you need to go on to be accepted on the doctorate which is a three –
year full time course.

How do you choose an Educational Psychology course?

Dr. Angie Wigford: Educational Psychology doctors are quite eclectic, and you have to be
confident that you can work with their particular training strategy.

Dr. Ian Smillie: The philosophies of educational psychologists are as broad as the philosophies in
psychology, so you’ve got some who were very focused on behaviorism. You know education to
some extent is very behaviorist focused, but then you’ve got others who might use more
psychodynamic approaches, more systemic approaches which is… I would say where I would
come from, so it’s very broad, you take something like IQ, you know, and if you want to debate, it’s
to talk about IQ with educational psychologists, because they will have so many different views.

Dr. Angie Wigford: A very good way of getting experience and finding out whether you really like
the job or not is to shadow, ask to shadow an Educational Psychologist and there are the
occasional assistant educational psychology posts, which are given to people in general who are
looking to get on the course.

What do Educational Psychologists do?

Dr. Ian Smillie: One of the key challenges is educational psychologist telling people what we do,
because it’s such a multi – faceted job, if you like.

Dr. Angie Wigford: The job is very varied, we are… I am in charge of or in control of what I do to a
large extent, so I would be in schools or I could be in homes, seeing little ones, two – years old. I
could be in a primary school, seeing seven, eight, nine year old or in a secondary school or I could
be in youth funding service with older children and I could training staff, I could be in Child
Protection Conference and the one of the main challenges of the job, really, is to make sure that
you cover everything and that you can get everything done in the time allotted and I tend to… One
of the big things is organization, so that I will schedule things, so they’re in the same area, so I
don’t spend my life in the car.

What are the most common misconceptions about Educational Psychologists?

Dr. Angie Wigford: The most common misconception is that all we do is test children, so even
now, I get asked if I’m in a new school: “Please, can you test this child?”, and the schools that
know me never ask that straightway, because they know that we use the consultation approach
and we do that first and then find out what needs to happen indeed if anything happened directly
with the child, so that’s the main misconception and it’s probably fairly damaging, because there is
a place for cognitive assessments and we have access to a massive range of other types of
assessment… Dynamic assessment we use alongside cognitive assessments, formal
assessments, so that does happen but it’s nothing like all of the work that we do. I think in the
past, it has been.

Dr. Ian Smillie: One of the most… The most common misconceptions in my experiences is the
fact that we are completely to do with learning and how people learn and how we can help them if
they don’t learn. If I’m allowed to say, that’s probably the least favorite part of my job… Is doing
the learning things and I’m very keen to tell the schools and the families that I work with that,
actually, there’s much more total to what we can do in terms of kind of, you know, social behavior,
you know, social and emotional things which very often for me are far more rewarding ways of
working. What’s happening and what’s changing in the profession is that new psychologists are
coming and with so many different ways of working and so many different approaches that it’s
becoming far more kind of dynamic, kind of profession and the opportunities in the way that you
want to work in use in psychology are very broad now.

How much time do you spend with children?

Dr. Angie Wigford: A lot of our work is with the people around the child moving away from the child
as the problem to people working together to very often change the environment and change their
attitudes to the child. I think I probably work with children 2030% of the time. It’s certainly not all of
our work, our most… My most productive work is probably because we don’t have enough time to
work individually with children over a long period of the time most of the time, but we were… I
work sengos in school and teachers in schools and parents and they’re working together very
often, you don’t need to see a child for too long. At the moment, I’m doing a longer piece of work
which is out, because it’s the summer holidays at the moment which is a CBT session with a child
and his mother at the same time three times a week for three weeks, but that’s very unusual.

Dr. Ian Smillie: As a profession we’ve to move away from that medical model of saying the
problem is within the child to thinking about how people around the child can change, but also the
other thing for us is that what we’ve really tried to do, you know, is to think about what else can we
do as psychologists cited in education to help education generally, so we, you know, will often
now engage in larger systemic pieces of work where we might be working with the hole school to
think about, you know, their behavioral policy or, you know, how they’re addressing, reading, you
know, across the school and things like that, so there’s lots of big wider things, which move us
away from just working directly with one child.

What are the challenges of being an Educational Psychologist?

Dr. Ian Smillie: With professional psychologists, we work with in a ethical code of conduct, but we
also work in local authorities who very often have a different agenda to the one that we might have
as professional psychologists and very often we’re balancing those two things which can be
extremely tricky and challenging.

Dr. Angie Wigford: Always having to go to different places, it’s impossible where I am to take
public transport and I think it probably is for most educational psychologists. The driving is just
something that I don’t like, but there’s really no way around it in this job. There may be a few
people who can cycle or walk or get public transport, maybe in London, but in general most DPS
rely on their cars a lot. The other thing I don’t really like about the job and I find quite stressful at
times is a massive amount of report with writing, they spend a lot of my time writing reports on
children and their function is for feedback partially , but of course you can do that verbally is for
panels, for pediatricians, for clinics.

Dr. Ian Smillie: You can be out and about quite a lot and that’s… I like that, because you get lots
of variety, but what happens when you’re out and about quite a lot is that each visit, more or less,
generates some kind of reports or some kind of record, so what can happen is that you can get to
the end of a term, for example, and have quite a lot of thoughts stacked up. One of the kind of
challenging things I would say will be that sometimes you are kind of managing conflict situations,
so you’re having to deal with people in quite heightened states of emotion at some times and that
can be quite demanding sometimes, quite stressful and it’s the value of working in teams really.
And having people to kind of share and offload with us.

Dr. Angie Wigford: Something else that we with a lot is critical incident, we respond to critical
incidents when requested by schools and critical incidents are the… An unexpected death or
serious injury to somebody within a community. Usually which… And the nature of is that it’s
unexpected, sometimes unexplained and a lot of people are involved. We go to the police
meetings after these incidents, there very often suicides or accidents, so train accidents, car
accidents… We are trained to respond to critical incidents with a particular method that’s used
throughout Europe and the states and there’s a team of four of us, but nobody likes to do that, I
think it’s very much appreciated when we do it, but we… You have to be very much in control of
yourself and your emotions to know how to handle these situations when there’s a lot of people
who are very distressed.

What are the most rewarding parts of the job?

Dr. Ian Smillie: Culturally, we’re very problem – focused and what about really kind of helps me, I
think is that when we get to the end of a piece of work or to a certain point in a piece of work
where people say: “Oh, actually I’m thinking about this in a different way now”. Which I find really
kind of rewarding… I also, you know, we don’t necessarily always or see our own position in how
things change, so we don’t always necessarily get a feeling that we’ve been a part of that change
process, because lots of our job is about going what can you try, so we’re about empowering
other people, which means that very often where is step back from what’s happening as well, but I
think it’s very rewarding when you get people together at the end of a kind of consultation process
and people are talking quite excitedly about what’s different now and you… And that’s that can be
quite powerful, I think.

Dr. Angie Wigford: This time, last year, I was working with a girl in high school and she was on the
verge of exclusion and we put things in place. I worked with her very little, we put things in place
for her and this time, this year’s, so one year later, this girl is really happy, she’s bringing presents
for the teachers, apparently, and her whole, her whole demeanor in school has changed and
when I asked somebody what had happened, what they said was that they felt that giving her that
the school was giving her that little bit of extra time and attention and she had found that she
belonged to the school, there’s one kind of example, so really like Ian says, you know, there’s a
big distance there, but that child’s life has changed and the school’s attitude towards her has
changed greatly.

Dr. Ian Smillie: A piece of work I’ve been doing this… Just this week, actually, with her last week
with a young lad in secondary school and the definition of the problem in, if you like is that he’s an
angry boy and so lots of you, you know, different things that happen in secondary school, but
actually when I went with him and went with mom and it would, you know, something very
significant had happened in his life where he’d had quite a big bereavement a big loss and that
had been the time when things had gone really badly, but and then my work involved kind of
working with school to say actually, you know, this young man is grieving, this is not an angry
person, this is somebody who’s having a natural reaction to it, you know, quite a significant life
event and being able to think about things in a different way, just made a huge difference to not
only people’s perceptions of that problem, but also his experience, you know, and how that
develops in school.

LINK OF THE VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Nm1RMGac28

VIDEO 2: THE ROLE OF AN EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST

Tanisha (Educational Psychologist): A typical day might be going to visit a school to do an

assessment with a child and if it’s an EHC statutory piece of assessment, working what observing
a child talking to the teachers or adults who know the child best in that setting, working for the
child themselves, do some assessments to talk to them and gain their views and also talking to
the child’s parent about how the view the current situation.

Jon (Senior Educational Psychologist): I feel that a myth, if you want to call it a myth out there is
that our bread and butter is to do cognitive assessments, because that is just one thing which an
Educational Psychologist could do to help answer questions. At the end of the day, I feel what our
job is to find out what this questions are and who can answer them best and it’s not always going
to be the Educational Psychology, you can ask them, because actually the parent might hold the
answer, the child might hold the answer, the school may be able to hold the answer. There might
be times to that we fool, maybe the Educational Psychologist toolkit is best situated to answer
those questions, so it’s about trying to work out what’s going on there, it’s not that we will go in
and we’ll be doing this or that, thinking about what’s happening at a more systemic level, when
we’re looking about clusters of children, young people working with senior leadership team to work
out what those needs are.

VIDEO LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q81wxvfjro