The workforce crisis in educational psychology is exacerbating a "postcode lottery" of services for vulnerable children and young people, according to Dr Gavin Morgan from the British Psychological Society (BPS). A recent BPS member survey found that 70% of respondents feel children in their local authority lack fair and equal access to an EP. The BPS is calling for urgent action in a new manifesto to address this issue and prevent failing some of the UK’s most vulnerable children.  

Dr Gavin Morgan is an EP, lecturer and chair of the Division of Educational and Child Psychology at the BPS. From his 25 years’ experience in the sector working with schools to implement early interventions and supporting aspiring educational psychologists through lecturing at University College London, Gavin has seen the implications funding cuts and privatisation has had on the system. “After you’ve been in the job long enough, you get that perspective of what works, what doesn't work, what did work, what needs to change.”

Pre-2010, schools had a named educational psychologist that worked with them for free, provided by their local authority. However, after a change of government in 2010, local authorities were hit hard by new austerity measures and as services were reduced, many local authorities started asking schools to pay for EP services. “There's a whole host of ethical questions about that,” Gavin said. “Should schools be asked to pay for the support assessment advice regarding kids with the highest level of need in their schools? But many local authorities used it to plug their funding gap.”

This led to a postcode lottery, as some local authorities kept the service free and more EPs began moving to private companies. In turn, more pressure was put on EPs working for local authorities, and as schools struggled to find the money to afford these services, children were increasingly receiving interventions later.

It's all kind of an imperfect storm really,” said Gavin. “Because schools weren't getting the advice early enough, because they weren't engaging with us, because we weren't able to find the early intervention [needed], these problems became entrenched and really tough for schools to manage.”

Now, many look to EHCPs as the answer for their intervention requirements, with schools and parents often viewing them as the only way to get their child/student the additional support they need. With over 20,000 children currently waiting for an EHCP assessment in England, many EPs, who are responsible for writing EHCP recommendations of support, feel their time is increasingly being taken up by paperwork rather than being in a school, providing early intervention that could prevent a child needing an EHCP in the first place.

As job satisfaction worsens and paperwork piles up, it seems EPs are feeling similar pressures to schools, just in the reverse, and has led to a quarter of the BPS survey respondents considering moving on from the sector or changing their employment model in the next 12 months. A worrying statistic given the upward trend in children with SEND. Recent figures from the Department for Education school census found that children in England with some kind of special educational need rose from 17.3% in 2023 to 18.4% in 2024.

But what is the answer? This is when the Psychology Matters campaign came into fruition. With an election imminent, Gavin had multiple meetings with policy advisers and campaign leads at the BPS, telling them of the challenges the sector was facing. Backed by hard statistics, a manifesto was created, explaining what needed to be done to ease the strain on schools and local authorities, and prevent EPs from moving to private companies or leaving the profession altogether. The BPS manifesto included calls to: 

• Ensure every school has a named educational psychologist based in their local authority, providing services free at the point of delivery, where they can have maximum impact working in partnership with colleagues in education, health, and social care.
• Increase focus on retaining educational psychologists working in local authorities, alongside a fully funded and costed workforce plan to make sure children have equal access to the additional educational support they need wherever in the country they attend school.  
• Undertake a holistic review of the positioning of SEND within the wider education system to enable increased focus on early intervention and preventative support for children and families and a truly inclusive education system.

An increased focus on early intervention

Gavin recognised that it can be frustrating for schools, as many find it hard to get an EP through the school gates. “Often, the only product that a school gets [from an EP] is a report for the EHCP and they can be quite formulaic, or tick boxy, and don't necessarily make a difference,” he said. “That shouldn't be the big part of our role which it is now, we can do so much more. So I understand the frustration. It's because we're not able to provide that early support.” 

For many, an EHCP or a diagnosis is the only way to receive the right intervention or funding for a student, but it hasn’t always been like that.

When I was more involved in supporting schools back in the days before austerity, I always saw an EHC request as a bit of a failure,” Gavin explained. “If a case I was working on went statutory, it meant that whatever I'd done hadn't worked.”

“What we're trying to do as psychologists is change the environment around the child. We're trying to change the perception of the teacher. We're trying to give support to that teacher, to the peers around that child. And sometimes getting hung up on labelling and diagnosing isn't necessarily helpful. It doesn't necessarily change anything.”

It's a chicken and egg situation, but by reducing the number of children and young people with EHCPs through earlier intervention, something many working in the school system wish to see, EPs can get out of the office and into the classroom.

Retaining EPs

When the Department of Education (DfE) carried out a research survey in 2023, 34% of principal EPs reported they were experiencing retention issues, with respondents suggesting that this was related to the high proportion of time EPs spend on statutory work and the opportunities to do more varied work in private practice. By getting EPs out into schools, Dr Gavin Morgan and the BPs believe retention could be improved. 

Most of my working week is spent at UCL teaching brilliant trainee psychologists all these wonderful interventions and then they go up to local authorities and they're just doing a bureaucratic job,” Gavin explained. “In order to keep these brilliant, qualified educational psychologists in post, their work diet needs to change because a lot of them are stuck in that statutory treadmill.”

Providing free EPs to schools again

According to the BPS manifesto, the best way to get to this point, to give EPs a better work diet and therefore more opportunity to implement earlier interventions, is by providing their services to schools for free and remove the requirement of an EHCP to see one.

“We think that by having that investment [into EPs], it would then lead to a reduction in the need for EHCP requests because we will be able to intervene early. We’ll be able to work with teachers, parents, and provide support at the earlier stage. So the difficulties don't become so entrenched in the first place.”

The BPS believe that addressing the challenges facing the EP workforce is crucial to ensuring children and young people receive the support they need. By improving retention and reinstating free EP services, over time the "postcode lottery" of early intervention could potentially be closed. With the new Labour government promising to focus on the SEND system, let’s hope they listen to the BPS’s urges to commit to more EP funding.

By Izzy Felton