EdPsychs aim is to make an outstanding contribution to education and society by advancing skilled educational psychology services that are a credit to the profession.
We have been providing independent educational psychology services to schools across London and the South East of England since 2008. In this time we have worked with outstanding Head teachers, psychologists and SENCOs, received ongoing professional feedback from children, families, schools and other professionals and learned a great deal about what works well in schools and what schools find useful.
As a result, we go far beyond sourcing highly skilled and professional educational psychologists and introducing them to schools. And the reason we do this? Because an outstanding psychology service needs a multi-layered support structure with a number of key components built in to it.
Every school is different. When you first express an interest in commissioning us, we will visit your school and talk to you about your school’s particular needs and the areas you would like to develop. We will then explore the different service options available to help you meet these needs.
If we feel that we can support you and be of benefit to your school, we will offer you an EdPsychs contract and introduce you to potential consultant educational psychologists.
Many schools also request an assistant psychologist contract to implement EP recommendations, support students directly, embed good psychological practice and train school staff (see here for more details), and we can discuss this too.
If you would like to learn more, you're welcome to contact us.
Good working relationships are the key to the successful delivery of educational psychology services. As such, we match schools and psychologists very carefully. Once we’ve met you and ascertained your schools needs we can then recommend a psychologist or psychologists to you.
Every psychologist who works on a school contract has been pre-screened against our core criteria, and then completed initial practice cases in a current EdPsychs’ school. During these cases we gather feedback from Headteachers, SENCOs, children and parents to evaluate whether the psychologist is able to offer an outstanding service to schools, and we also work with the psychologist to ensure their reports are clear, easy to read, compliant, and have good, evidence based recommendations that can be applied in schools.
When you sign an EdPsychs' contract, we will set you up on the EdPsychs' portal and you can see exactly how many EP days you have available, and when the days were used.
The educational psychologists will enter their days as they complete them, and your school's allocated person (usually the SENCo or Inclusion manager) will sign them off as completed.
If you have an assistant psychologist, they also log their time weekly, and again, your school's allocated person will just sign it off.
In this way, we ensure that you receive your full allocation of time. You can book additional time if needed, carry time across into a new academic or financial year or receive a refund on any unused time. It's all up to you.
The educational psychologists who support our schools are experienced and skilled practitioners who are committed to advancing an outstanding service.
We help them do this by advancing regular CPD days that they are welcome to attend, access additional training and share their skills (and you can see some of the upcoming EP days by clicking here).
We also feel we have an ethical responsibility to provide as many support structures as we can for psychologists providing services to EdPsychs’ schools. As such we have a ‘four layers of supervision model’ where psychologists can seek advice from colleagues to better support schools and clients.
In addition, psychologists have their own EdPsychs’ portal where they can access training materials placed there by other psychologists, a range of ‘Quality First Teaching’ presentations and the confidential psychologists forum where they can seek advice and guidance from peers.
Schools with an EdPsychs’ contract, like many schools, face their own challenges. As such, we ensure that they have regular opportunities to meet each other, access EdPsychs training days, communicate through the confidential EdPsychs forums (there is a Headteacher forum and a separate SENCO one) and share good practice and expertise so that they can better support their students and communities.
A recent external auditor evaluating the SEN provision advanced by three EdPsychs’ schools described their inclusion packages and service delivery models as ‘pioneering’. These are models that other EdPsychs’ schools often wish to see and integrate into their own schools, and we frequently facilitate introductions.
Schools generally book a 20, 30 or 40-day contract that can be delivered over an academic or a financial year dependent on the needs of the school and the availability of the psychologists. We don’t offer shorter contracts as we find schools get the best value for money when psychologists visit their school more regularly, build rapport and can support students and staff over time.
The exact model of service delivery, the content and the mode of delivery is decided directly between the schools and the psychologists. Some schools and psychologists like blocks of time (say two or three days a month) and other schools and psychologists prefer a weekly or fortnightly schedule.
Some schools like an assessment service, whereas others prefer more consultations, training and parent and staff support.
Some schools focus on students with SEN, others request whole school support, guidance on improving the incidence of quality first teaching, help for underachieving students, support to develop high achieving students or support to develop bespoke provisions or specialties.
Again, every contract is different as every school is different.
All contracts are self-contained and include all the support work around assessment, planning, training, implementation, report writing and evaluation.
We offer a very thorough and multi-faceted service, and it’s a good idea to look at other areas of this site to gather more information.
Prior to our initial meeting to evaluate your school’s needs, we will always introduce you to Headteachers and SENCOs who are already commissioning our services so you can discuss the service in more detail with them prior to our visit.
In many respects this is the best guide to the quality of any service and we will happily provide you with contact details.
We would also suggest that you contact at least two other service providers too, both to satisfy your governing body and also because it is good practice and part of any school’s due diligence process.
