Profile

I live near Hull with 4 guinea pigs (Barry Sparkle, Zeus, Gingernut and Poseidon), 2 children (aged 7 and 9), 1 hamster (Aries) and 1 husband. I did not name any of the pets. I don’t get out much and so I become visibly excited at the mention of visiting cool places like castles or Italian restaurants (the greatest pizza ever is blue cheese and pine nuts).

I used to have proper hobbies like fencing, running and customising furniture but now I just make cakes and take my children to their hobbies instead. If I get downtime I am usually watching or reading something about psychology or history, particularly the Vikings, which which I am a bit obsessed. In fact I even get up early most days to do a Viking workout under the direction of the Head Viking at https://www.thevikingmethod.com

I was almost in the upcoming series 3 of Victoria on ITV when I wandered into the area where they were filming  on the High Street in Hull’s old town recently. However I am delighted I don’t pass as a street urchin and didn’t make the cut.

Being a Graduate Psychologist in an independent Educational Psychology practice is really varied and always interesting. I might be working with or training teachers, or finding out about a young person to help them in education in one of these 4 areas:

• learning and thinking
• physical
• communication
• emotions and social life

I usually do this by meeting and working with the young person themselves (as well as the people around them) and finding out about them, their thoughts, their views and their feelings. I have a short time to try to get that person to trust me. If an Educational Psychologist does a good job, they can change children’s lives and help them to be happy and achieve at school (and hopefully for the rest of their lives).

I have recently written a book review, helped with developing an app for use in schools to teach basic skills and I often share the day’s achievements or interesting observations on social media.

I am sometimes in an office (typing reports, doing research and best of all talking talking talking with colleagues. This helps me to learn, to shape my thoughts and to decide on what I should do with particular children and young people.)

I might have ‘supervision’, which means talking over the cases I’m working on with a more experienced psychologist and getting their advice.

I am also often in schools and a typical day might include working with a young person, perhaps because they are not learning at the same level as the rest of their class. I would try to find out what’s stopping them – maybe testing their memory or reading ability, perhaps exploring what they like and dislike at school or doing a Dynamic Assessment. This is a really useful and interesting way to find out how someone does a task and how they can best be helped by an adult.  It involves the young person copying a complex picture, then seeing what they can remember about it, then working together to come up with ways to remember and draw the picture without missing any bits, and then drawing it again.

Perhaps a child or young person is showing behaviour that the school are concerned about, like hurting others. In this situation I might watch them in one of their lessons or on the playground (hopefully without them realising) before I meet them. This might give me some clues to what happens before they show the behaviour – maybe things others say, or something about the lesson or classroom is causing them to feel worry or fear. When I work with them 1:1 I might try to find out how much they understand and control their own feelings, what their ideal classroom would be like or how they feel about friendships.

Sometimes we work with young people who have special educational needs, such as a diagnosis of an Autism Spectrum Condition, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Dyslexia (although there is a great deal of debate amongst psychologists about whether saying someone has Dyslexia is very scientific or very helpful:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoSc5Z64B98)

At the end of all of this the aim is to have a tailor-made set of things for the school to do to help that young person be happy and supported and have what they need at school so that they can get on with enjoying all the learning!

If you find yourself thinking about things like:

‘why does my friend always do that?’

‘why do I like some people more than others?’

‘why can I just not get it in that lesson?’

‘why do I keep making that same mistake over and over?’

then maybe you are a psychologist too!

Working with young people is really interesting and fun but its also a great privilege to have their time and highly confidential, so I can’t put any pictures up of me working with any. I’ve put up some pictures of my office, although its not quite as exciting. Unless my boss brings his dog in.