What’s your area?
My academic research explores the psychological impact of school exclusion and considers alternatives. Over the last few years I have worked in a youth offending team, with families and young people also subject to Child in Need and...
school
Coronavirus has brought new challenges and disrupted the pattern of life. In education we are used to changes every year, but this abrupt transition took the classroom into home, with students learning remotely and parents adopting teaching roles. We are currently in limbo,...
Last month, my article on self-directed education ‘School’s Out’ was published in The Psychologist. A few days later, in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, all the schools in Italy, France and...
In my early career as a clinical psychologist, I worked with several young people who had stopped attending school. I understood this as anxiety-driven school refusal. I devised graded-exposure programmes, and wrote letters making it clear that in my view a successful outcome...
Ave Kotze’s November response to Pooky Knightsmith’s September article ‘Breaking down...
The article ‘Breaking down barriers’ by Pooky Knightsmith (September) on school-based approaches to mental health presents many thought-provoking ideas around how children’s...
Schools are becoming ever-more responsible for schooling students in a far wider sense than education. When it comes to mental health we’ve moved from tentative awareness-raising to proactively tackling stigma. We’re empowering the next generation to be unafraid of mental...
While approximately one in four children and young people show signs of a mental health problem only around 25 to 40 per cent of them receive help from a mental health professional – if at all. The evidence on psychological support in schools and colleges has recently been...
The context for educational psychologists has changed very significantly. In a DfES 2006 review, the outlook for local authority...
'When schools pay for services they demand more – that means we must be more creative in what we do’
You can argue that educational psychology fills more column inches and provides more soundbites in media debates about psychology’s role in society than any other application of the discipline. How psychological input affects or is denied to children perhaps causes more...