Psychology Career Pathways Educational Psychologist

you become an educational psychologist with psychology degree that con that has The Graduate basis for registration from the British psychological Society you also need experience with children was previously teacher so qualified as teacher but you don't need that qualification anymore so for me it was via series of jobs which were focused on working with Children and Families which helped me to kind of get the experience needed really and then you need to go on the to be accepted on the doctorate which is three-year full-time course educational psychology doctorates are quite eclectic and you have to be confident that you can work with their particular training strategy the philosophies of educational psychologists are as broad as the philosophies psychology so you've got you've got some who are very focused on behaviorism you know Ed education some to some extent is very behaviorist focused but then you've got others who might use more psychodynamic approaches more systemic approaches which is would say where would come from so that so it's very very Broad and you take something like IQ you know and and if you want to debate it's to talk about IQ with educational psychologists because they will have so many different views very good 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 one of the key challenges is educational psychologist telling people what we do because it's it's such multifaceted job if you like the job is very varied we are am in charge of or in control of what do to large extent so would be in schools or could be in homes seeing little ones 2-year-olds could be in primary school seeing seven eight nine year olds or in secondary school or could be in the youth funding service with older children and could be training could be training staff could be in child protection conference and the one of the main challenges of the job really is to make sure that that you cover everything and that you you can get everything done in the in the time allotted and tend to one of the big things is organization so that will schedule things so they're in the same area so don't spend my life in the car the most common misconception is that all we do is test children so even now get asked if I'm in new school please can you test this child and the schools that know me never ask that straight away because they know that we use the consultation approach and we we do that first and and then find out what needs to happen indeed if anything needs to happen directly with the child so that's the main misconception and it's probably fairly damaging because there is place for cognitive assessments and we have access to 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 think in the past it has been one of the the the most common misconceptions in my experience is is the fact that we are completely to do with learning and how people learn and and 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 is doing the learning things and and and I'm very keen to tell the schools and the families that work with that actually there's there's much more to to to what we can do in terms of kind of you know social behavior you know social and emotional things which which very often for me are far more rewarding ways ways of working what's happening and what's changing in the profession is that new psychologists are coming in 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 and the opportunities for working in the way that you want to work and using psychology are very broad now 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 think probably work with children 20 30% 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 long period of time most of the time but we work work with senos in school and teachers in schools and parents and when they're working together very often you don't need to see child for too long at the moment I'm doing longer piece of work which is because it's there's some holidays at the moment which is CBT session with child and his mother at the same time three times week for three weeks but that's very unusual as profession we've tried 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 is to think about what else can we do as psychologists cited in educ ucation to help education generally so we we you know we're often now engage in larger systemic pieces of work where we might be working with the whole school to think about you know their behavioral policy or or you know how they're addressing reading you know across across the school and things like that so so there's lots of big wider things which which move us away from just working directly with one one child we're professional psychologists we work within an ethical code of conduct but we also work in local authorities who very often have 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 and challenging we always having to go to different places it's impossible where am to take public transport and think it probably is for most educational psychologists the driving is just something that don't like but there's really no way around it in this job there may be few people who can cycle or walk or get public transport maybe in London but in general most EPS rely on their cars lot the other thing don't really like about the job and find quite stressful at times is massive amount of report writing spend 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 you can be out and about quite lot and that's like that because you get lots of variety but what happens when you're out and about quite lot is that each visit more or less generates some kind of report or some kind of record so what can happen is that you can get to the end of term for example and have quite lot of reports stacked up one of the other kind of challenging things would say would be that sometimes you are you are kind of managing conflict situations so you're having to De deal with people in quite heightened states of emotion at sometimes and that and that can be quite demanding sometimes quite stressful and and it's the value of working in teams really and having people to kind of share with and offload with something else that we deal with lot is critical incidents we respond to critical incidents when requested by schools and critical of the instance are the an unexpected death or Serious injury to somebody Within community usually which and the nature of is that it's unexpected sometimes unexplained and lot of people are involved we are we we go to the police meetings after these incidents they're very often suicides or accidents so train accidents car accidents we are trained to respond to critical incidents with particular method that's used throughout Europe and and the states and there's team of four of us but nobody likes to do that think it's very much appreciated when we do it but we you have to be very much in control of of of yourself and your emotions and know how to handle these situations when there's lot of people who are very distressed culturally we're very problem focus and what what really kind of helps me think is that when we get to the end of piece of work or to certain point in piece of work where people say actually I'm thinking about this in different way now which find really really kind of rewarding also you know we don't necessarily always see our own position in in how things change so we don't always necessarily get feeling that we've been 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 we're step back from from what's Happening as well but think it's very rewarding when you get people together at the end of of of kind of consultation process and people are talking quite excitedly about what's different now and how things have changed and you and and that's that can be quite powerful think this time last year was working with girl in the high school and she was on the verge of exclusion and we put things in place worked with her very little we put things in place for her and this time this year 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 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 that's one kind of example so really like Ian says you know there's there's big distance there but that child's life has changed and the school's attitude towards her has changed greatly piece of work I've been doing this just this week actually with or last week with young lad in secondary school and and the definition of of the problem if you like is that he's an angry boy and so lots of you know difficult things that happen in secondary school but actually when went met with him and met with mom and and you know something very significant had happened in his life where he'd had quite big bement 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 this this young man is grieving this is this is this is not an angry person this is somebody who's having natural reaction to you know quite significant life event and being able to think about things in different way just made huge difference to to not only people's perceptions of that problem but but also his his experience you know and how that develops in school