It’s over a century since Cyril Burt, the first educational psychologist to be appointed in Britain, started his work for London County Council in 1913.

Today local authorities across England employ 2,700 educational psychologists (EPs), who typically have a psychology degree as well as a specialist doctorate. This, says Theodora Theodoratou, principal educational psychologist for Wandsworth in south-west London, “means we are uniquely positioned to think about how children learn, develop, feel happy, feel a sense of belonging”.

But for many in schools, the exact nature of an EP’s work remains something of a mystery.

Indeed, Simon Ungar, who has been an EP in Wandsworth for 15 years, says members of his profession have “always struggled to shift perception from the idea that we’re just going in and doing IQ scores to the much broader range of activities we’re trained to do”.

So what should schools know about the work of EPs, and how can they make best use of it? Tes spoke to three members of the Wandsworth EP team to find out.

The role of an educational psychologist

The function that likely first comes to mind when you think of educational psychology - providing support to individual pupils - is, indeed, a core part of the role.

Iesha Ginn, who has worked as an EP in Wandsworth since 2021, explains that Sendcos at both primary and secondary schools refer students for EP support. “Schools may come to us and express that a child is not able to access learning,” she says. In other scenarios, a school may report that a child is experiencing attention difficulties, presenting with anxiety or social-emotional needs or is absent through emotion-based non-attendance.

Lots of the children whom EPs work with have special educational needs and disabilities or are on the way to being diagnosed. But an EP’s job is “not to focus on the diagnosis per se, but explore how that looks for them” in school, Ginn says.

They do this via information-gathering. “It’s a psychological process of using skilful questions to really unpick” a child’s situation, says Ginn, explaining that this could involve meeting with teachers, parents and the student; observing them in lessons; and an assessment.

Which assessment tool an EP uses depends on the situation. “If we know a child is experiencing worries about academic performance, we would not necessarily use a standardised assessment tool,” which looks at where a child compares with the rest of the population and “may be anxiety-inducing”, Ginn says.

She explains that alternative methods include dynamic assessment tools that identify a student’s learning potential - such as a complex figure drawing test or the Children’s Analogical Test of Modifiability.

Another tool is the Blob Tree: an EP shows the pupil an animated picture of human-like “blob” figures on a tree and asks which one represents how they feel in a particular circumstance, maybe in a maths lesson or at break time. It helps to “explore the child’s internal world, their lived experiences that they may not be able to vocalise”, Ginn says.

‘Parents, school and the child hold the answers’

She adds that next, the EP brings the results of these exercises together to create an emerging formulation - a narrative about what the child is experiencing at that point in time. “Then we would meet with the child, if it’s appropriate, and the parents and the school again, and share that tentatively with them, and ask, ‘Does this sound like you?’” The EP then works with the school to co-construct strategies to support the child.

It is the school, rather than the EP, that introduces these strategies, firstly because an EP’s time across a local authority is in high demand, but also because an EP is there to “facilitate the space, rather than us being fixers”, Ginn says. “We believe that the parents, school and the child hold the answers.”

Through regular subsequent meetings with the school, the EP will check in on the child’s progress. Sometimes the student will require a higher level of support, at which point the Sendco may apply for an education, health and care needs assessment.

At this stage, an EP is required - alongside other professionals such as a speech and language therapist or occupational therapist - to give expertise on what the child’s needs are, and what provision could help. This contributes to the resultant education, health and care plan (EHCP).

EHCP work is part of an EP’s statutory duties, meaning that there is no cost to the family or school because it is a legal requirement. All schools across the country have access to EPs for this statutory work, and an EP is not required to be involved until this point.

Schools paying for EP services

Exactly what else a school might use an EP for will depend on what is available locally. Before 2008, EP services were provided to schools for free. Since then public sector cuts have led some local authorities to move to a partially or fully traded services model, meaning that schools can choose to buy additional services. They can do so by contacting the relevant team via their local council. In Wandsworth, the large, 17-strong EP team dedicates around 70 per cent of its time to traded or commissioned services, which schools have opted to buy in.

“Each school, depending on its needs and the budget it has available, is free to commission various combinations of the packages we have,” says Theodoratou.

Individual child assessments form part of this work, and, says Ungar, here an EP plays a role in capacity building. “Part of the philosophy behind the consultation process is that, as you go through that several times, the school starts to do it automatically,” he says - and at some point the school might not require the help of an EP at all.

But, adds Ginn, “I would love schools to understand that our work goes beyond individual assessment and beyond statutory involvement.”

Some of that work is staff training. For example, EPs train teaching assistants to become emotional literacy support assistants (ELSAs), who have learned how to apply psychological theory to provide social and emotional support to students.

This, too, is a form of capacity building. “Once there are ELSAs in the school community, that training becomes part of [the school’s] ethos and value system,” says Ginn. “It means there is a universal level of support in place.”

Training teachers and TAs

Similarly, Ungar says that he is increasingly asked to train staff on trauma-informed and relational practice. He has also delivered training for teaching assistants on the latest research around when to help a child and when to hold back, and teacher training on specific aspects of psychology, such as working memory, which he describes as “the almost unconscious bit of your brain that’s holding stuff and recombining things”.

“Children vary in their working memory capacity,” he says. “[Our job] is about helping teachers understand how that might affect a child, and what you can do in the classroom to support children” who struggle with it.

Sometimes these are one-off sessions that schools put on as part of their CPD offering, while at other times the EP will return for a follow-up to hear how the strategies they suggested are going.

Ungar has even had schools request training for parents, such as on how they can best support their child with homework. Meanwhile, he says an EP might attend a school’s monthly coffee morning for parents of students with SEND, “either to talk about a particular topic or just to be there for parents to ask questions”.

Critical incidents

Theodoratou, who leads the Wandsworth team, adds that another part of an EP’s work is advising schools on critical incidents. The local authority offers this service for free rather than schools having to use commissioned time.

“We’ve had sad cases of death in the school community, and we use psychology to support and help school leaders cope with the tragedy,” she explains.

EPs have even been tasked with helping schools that have had to close due to falling rolls, which is an increasing concern in London. In such cases, “we use the psychology of endings and uncertainty to inform policy and support the school to support their school community”, Theodoratou says.

“It’s thinking about: what do we know about group psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, that we can bring into discussions? How do we turn this into a resilience-building experience, as opposed to a traumatic experience, for all involved, from the headteacher to the families?”

“We constantly try to give psychology away,” Theodoratou explains, summing up an EP’s overall aim in whatever they are tasked with. “Of course, the majority of our work is helping to understand what is happening when things go wrong,” she adds. But a better long-term investment “is us applying this understanding into preventing problems from presenting in the first place”.

A sustainable approach

Individualised pupil support will always be a part of an EP’s work. In these cases, Ungar would like schools to “involve us as early as possible. If we’re involved really early, in some cases that child might not necessarily end up needing statutory assessment”, he says.

But the more schools look beyond EPs’ work as just being with individual students, and instead embrace EP staff and parent training, the more “self-sufficient, self-sustainable” education settings will be, Ungar adds.

Because ultimately, it is school staff who remain with the children after an EP has gone to their next appointment. “I want teachers and schools to feel empowered,” Ginn says.

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