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...
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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...
Many parents will commiserate over the daily struggle to get their children to sit down and focus on homework. With increasing pressure to participate in extracurricular sports and clubs, and with the widespread availability of video, computer and tablet games – each more...
A recent report in Schools Week outlined a slump in the number of educational psychologists employed in local authorities, decreasing from 1900 in 2010 to 1650 in 2015. Journalist Freddie Whittaker also pointed to a survey from the...
The benefits of professional school-based counsellors in supporting young people experiencing emotional problems will be evaluated through an extensive three-year study, which will establish a dedicated counselling service in 18 English secondaries.
The randomised...