Educational Psychology: North London Borough

The challenge

Like many local authorities across the country, the council had significant SEND and inclusion service capacity issues. They were finding it difficult to recruit educational psychologists and had a limited traded offer. The council needed a trusted partner. One that could quickly deliver service improvements and co-produce a new traded Educational Psychology Services (EPS) offer.

The council’s EPS had significant capacity issues due to the volume of vacancies, including the PEP; a scenario echoed by local authorities across the UK, but particularly in London where demand for EPs is at an all time high.

The council had been using a combination of temporary and locum educational psychologists to address some of its capacity issues. However, the short-term concentration on increasing capacity to meet the demands on statutory services meant there was a limited focus on strategic vision and growth of the service. This resulted in a ‘cycle’ of recruiting locum EPs to meet a short-term challenge without really addressing the key issues of leadership, infrastructure, growth and income.

The lack of service leadership and limited infrastructure to grow the EP Service (EPS) offer had resulted in a service that provided a limited offer to the local authority, school community, children, young people and families. The council was acutely aware of the dangers of losing direction on delivering a traded service and wanted to reshape its delivery model to integrate the EP function into a new SEND operating model with the support of Innovate Psychology.

Redefining the 'central core' offer

At the same time, we worked with the council to redefine its ‘central core’ offer. We helped reframe its critical incident support to schools, introduced central training, and created parental engagement opportunities; all key components of a high-quality EP service.

This also involved developing new service policies and procedures to ensure effective quality assurance measures were embedded and that adherence to psychological advice statutory timeframes increased.

A new and improved central training offer to local schools played a vital role in expanding the council’s central core offer. Within the first six months, our team held sessions with the borough-wide head teacher and SENCO community, significantly increased the number of settings engaging with the service and achieved a considerable growth in traded income.

The results

Offering an EP service beyond just the statutory obligations is already contributing to a strong SEND approach across the borough. In the first five months, traded income rose from £58,000 (the previous annual traded income) to over £200,000. At the same time, we increased the council’s adherence to psychological advice statutory timeframes from 19% to 88%.

At the five-month mark, internal educational psychology capacity issues were already being resolved. Following a successful recruitment cycle, we increased the capacity of the council’s in-house EP team with an additional 3.0 fte permanent educational psychologists. Moreover, the move towards a more structured service offers an attractive working environment for future educational psychologists joining the team.

As an ongoing project at the time of writing this case study, we’ve had some positive feedback on our performance.

“Innovate Psychology is responsive and creative in its solutions and has worked around operational challenges, willing to remain focused on the strategic objective. You offer skilled knowledgeable people with credibility in the sector which has given a boost to the leadership of our in-house teams and has validated our vision” SEND Strategic Group