In this Issue:

Forthcoming Events

For your diaries

A BPS One-Day Research Symposium for Psychology postgraduates will be held on 19th April - planning for this event has been led by DEdPsy Co-Director Dr Sean Cameron. Click here for details.

On 18th May year 3 trainees will be presenting their research to year 1 and 2 trainees at the first DECPsy Research Conference, here at Bedford Way. Research Advisors are welcome to attend if they wish. Click here for the programme.

SEN and Disability Green Paper consultation - your response needed by 30 June

Please ensure you give your responses to this important paper - particularly questions 49-51 relating to Educational Psychology - before 30 June 2011 by clicking here, then selecting 'respond online' or 'download response form'.

Your News and Views are always welcome - please send us your comments

Spring 2011

New Faces and Graduations on the DEdPsy Programme

In January 2011 we were joined by our thirteenth cohort of CPD Doctorate course members. A warm welcome to Karen Bailey, Therese Brophy, Helen Connaughton, Richard Egan, Ben Jones, Elaine Killerby, Gerard Lennon, Jeremy Morris, Eunice Peter, Marian Prinsley, Katharine Sharpe and Lucy Warren.

And many congratulations on behalf of the whole team to our latest group of CPD Doctoral graduates, Dr Gail Bailey, Dr Anne Marie Baverstock, Dr Sue Bennett, Dr Fiona Cheam, Dr Charlotte Friel, and Dr Shami Rait, who have recently completed and will be graduating with the DECPsy 07-10 group on 8 September 2011. We also look forward to publishing news of several further 2011 DEdPsy awards in the next edition.

Awards and Accolades

Educational Psychology Graduate Receives National Honour

Dr Mariam Aljunied has received the Singaporean equivalent of an MBE for public service to children with special educational needs. Mariam completed her initial professional training MSc at UCL in 1994-5 and returned in 2002-5 to undertake her PhD in Autism, supervised by Norah and Professor Uta Frith. A paper based on her main study has been published in a highly rated international journal: Aljunied, M. & Frederickson, N. (2011) Cognitive indicators of different levels of special educational support needs in autism. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 5 (1), 368-376.

Mariam, who is the Lead Psychologist in the Educational Psychology Service in Singapore, is pictured above receiving the award from the President of Singapore. Click here to view an article on the NDA awards published in the Singapore press. The Singapore Service has seen rapid growth in recent years, with the establishment of 64 EP posts. It currently comprises 15 fully qualified EPs, with a trainee EP (Vivien Yang, UCL DECPsy year 3), 17 Associate Psychologists who have completed the postgraduate diploma developed by the UCL Educational Psychology Group, in collaboration with the National Institute of Education Singapore, and 12 Associate Psychologists who are in Year 1 of the second run of the Diploma. Also pictured are the students from the second run, together with Norah and Jane Turner, Deputy PEP in Buckinghamshire, who visited Singapore in January 2011 to provide a week of training on the Diploma. Click here to view further pictures from that week's visit.

Press Coverage, Publications and Research

DECPsy trainees in the news

Trainees and graduates of the DECPsy programme have grabbed themselves some press attention in recent months - we always knew they were a newsworthy bunch! DECPsy 07-10 graduate Dr Shane Gallagher's thesis research on the impact of cyberbullying on secondary school children was covered by the Press Association resulting in a plethora of regional coverage. Shane was interviewed by BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and the Toronto Star as well as presenting his findings at the Division of Educational and Child Psychology annual conference on Thursday 13 January 2011 - click here to read more.

Shane also organised a conference around the subject, speaking alongside Will Gardner, Chief Executive of Childnet International, and other national figures at the Cyber Bullying Conference on 22 March at the Microsoft Research Centre in Cambridge.

Meanwhile, also hot off the press in recent months, DECPsy 08-11 trainee Tim Jones' role as the (believed) youngest chair of governors at a secondary in England was covered in the Times Educational Supplement on 10 December 2010. Tim became a school govenor aged just 21, shortly after completing his undergraduate degree. Read Tim's article here.

DEdPsy Publications and Promotions

Congratulations to our DEdPsy graduates on the following publications from their doctoral studies in 2010:

'Cognitive Behaviour Therapies and their Implications for Applied Educational Psychology Practice' was published by recent DEdPsy graduate Dr Shami Rait, with Jeremy Monsen and Garry Squires, in Educational Psychology in Practice, 26 (2), 105-122.

'Parenting Dimensions of British Pakistani and White Mothers of Primary School Children' was published by DEdPsy graduate and DECPsy tutor Dr Shama Ali and Norah Frederickson in Infant and Child Development. This article, first published online on 23rd August 2010, can be accessed here.

'Conductive Eucation: Appraising the Evidence" was published by DEdPsy graduate Dr Louise Tuersley and Norah Frederickson in Educational Psychology in Practice, 26 (4), 353-373.


Congrats also to current DEdPsy course member Sandy Tahan whose article 'The relationship between language dominance and pre-reading skills in young bilingual children in Egypt" (co-written with Tony Cline and Souhila Messaoud-Galusi) is due to be published shortly by in a special edition of the journal Reading and Writing. An online version can be viewed now - click here to access it

Meanwhile, DEdPsy Research Tutor Dr Roger Booker has been exploring how current academic theories of leadership can shed light on the organisation of children's services. The results of his review have just been published online by the Journal Children and Society. He emphasises the importance of children's services developing "leadership capacity" at all levels and sees an important role for EPs when working in multi-professional teams. Click here to read the article.


Finally, in professional news, we were delighted to hear that DEdPsy graduate and former DECPsy tutor Dr Michelle Sancho has recently been promoted to Assistant Principal Educational Psychologist at West Berkshire.

Personal News

As ever there is some family news for this edition - coming this time from two DEdPsy course members plus a DECPsy tutor/DEdPsy graduate!

2011 kicked off with some new arrivals on the DEdPsy programme. Firstly, DEdPsy 09 course member Claire Martin had a baby girl on 28th January, Evie (pictured left). Baby Evie weighed in at 8lbs 3oz and considerately arrived one day after Claire managed to complete an assignment submission! Next was the turn of DEdPsy 07 course member Marion Everist who is pictured (right) with her new daughter, Anna Catherine, who was born on 13th February weighing 9lbs 3oz. Many congratulations to both Marion and Claire.

And finally, DEdPsy graduate and DECPsy professional tutor Jess Dewey welcomed baby Meredith Kate into the world 'fairly punctually' in the early hours of 6th March 2011, weighing in at 7lbs 4oz, and the pair returned home - extremely punctually indeed - the very same morning! Meredith is pictured with Jess' son Jack who is taking big brotherhood very seriously indeed as this lovely shot proves. Congratulations to Jess and the whole Dewey family.

Congrats also to DECPsy 08-11 trainee Julia Parsonson who got engaged this February to her boyfriend of 6 and a half years, Stuart.

Recent Conferences

DECP Annual Conference, January 2011, Newcastle

This year's DECP conference was an eventful one for the Educational Psychology Group, with the DEdPsy symposium and the launch of the DECP/BPS Professional Supervision Guidelines for Educational Psychologists ensuring a strong UCL presence. Jane Leadbetter and DECPsy Co-Director Sandra Dunsmuir led the supervision working group. The guidelines are available to view/download on our website, click here to access them.

The conference's DEdPsy Symposium ("Understanding How Effective Interventions Work: Psychologically Enriched Evaluation"), organized by DEdPsy Co-Directors Tony Cline and Sean Cameron with presentations from DEdPsy graduates Dr Ben Hayes, Dr Sue Bennett and Dr Louise Tuersley-Dixon, proved the best attended event of the day. Click here to view the programme. For full details of the speaker papers from both the 2011 and 2010 symposia please visit the DEdPsy website

Educational Psychologists & Educational Neuroscience

"Educational neuroscience is a rapidly emerging discipline, with educationists, psychologists and neuroscientists working together to improve learning across the lifespan. This conference in the 'Current Trend' series, sponsored by the British Journal of Educational Psychology, aimed to promote interdisciplinary engagement, introduce the methodological and practical issues, and specifically engage educational psychologists.

Day 1 began with brief welcomes from Andy Tolmie, on behalf of the British Journal of Educational Psychology, and Diana Laurillard on behalf of the Centre for Educational Neuroscience (based across Birbeck College, the Institute of Education and University College London), who hosted the event.

Norah Frederickson (University College London) identified key areas for development from an educational psychologist's perspective: understanding of biological and biometric processes that determine learning, knowledge of neurological determinants providing better understanding of typical and atypical development and implications for education risk, and neural methods for evaluating the remediation processes as well as for furthering educational debate. Acknowledging a major challenge from the very different philosophies underpinning psychology, education and the natural sciences, she proposed educational psychologists as excellently placed to mediate the developing neurological agenda within the educational context. In assessing the state and development of children with whom they work, they have models to inform cognitive, affective and environment levels - but the biological level is a different story, and at the neural level the box is almost empty. Integrative causal models of disorder are needed."

From McAteer, E. & Jarrett, C. (2010). An emerging dialogue of learning. The Psychologist, 23 (8), 628-9.

The conference, which was well attended by educational psychologists, heard from Usha Goswami (University of Cambridge), Michael Thomas (Birbeck College), Heinz Wimmer (University of Salzburg), Daniel Ansari (University of Western Ontario), Marie-Pascale Noel (University of Loubain), Brian Butterworth (UCL), Uta Frith (UCL), Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (UCL), Christine Howe (University of Cambridge), Simon Baron-Cohen (University of Cambridge) and Denis Mareschal (Birbeck College). PowerPoints are available at http://www.educationalneuroscience.org.uk/events.html The papers will be published later this year as a monograph of the British Journal of Educational Psychology.

CPD Leading Edge Psychology Day - 28 March 2011

'Persistent Non-Attendance at School: Anxiety, Phobia, Avoidance or ODD Behaviour?'

School refusal is a problem that is stressful for the children, their parents and their teachers. Failing to attend school has significant short and long-term effects on children's social, emotional, and educational development. This well-attended leading-edge psychology day reviewed past and current research in this area, inviting delegates to develop a better understanding of the needs of those children who are refusing to attend school by considering the most appropriate methods of managing this problem and hearing about a number of innovatory interventions being carried out by clinical and educational psychology practitioners.

Keynote speakers were Dr Nigel Blagg, a self-employed educational pschologist who wrote the pioneering book on 'School Phobia' and is Director of NBA Solutions Ltd, Dr Katherine Lawrence, a clinical psychologist working in the Berkshire Child Anxiety Clinic with children aged 7 - 12, many of whom have difficulty attending school, and Prof Ken Reid, Chair in Education at Swansea Metropolitan University, who has been carrying out research into non-attendance at school for many years and is the author of 15 educational books and 52 journal articles, including a number on persistent school absenteeism and truancy.

More information on the day is available on our CPD website. DEdPsy course members and tutors can access a selection of presentations from the day on the DEdPsy course materials module on Moodle.

Back to the top