Reconstructing Educational Psychology

Bill Gillham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032247014
• eBook ISBN: 9781000568950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Behavioural Management

First published in 1978, Reconstructing Educational Psychology presents a new look at topics of central social concern such as children's rights, the community approach to children's problems, the inutility of traditional concepts of intelligence and personality, the interactionist approach to the concept of 'deviant' behaviour and the invalidity of psychiatric concepts of 'maladjustment'. New ideas are the core of the book. It begins with historical and personal accounts of the origin and the nature of the situation of educational psychology. It spells out the way in which new thinking determines new practice, and the extent to which progress has been made. The book will be of interest to teachers, psychologists as well as to students of pedagogy and psychology.

1 DIRECTIONS OF CHANGE*

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279853-1

* This chapter is based on a paper given at the DES course ‘Psychological Services and the Schools’ held at Sheffield Polytechnic in September 1977.

Bill Gillham

Few professions can have gone through such a radical change in basic practices and ideas as have educational psychologists during the past decade. Indeed, during the past two or three years change has been proceeding at an almost exponential rate so that the professional scene has been looking somewhat confused. It has, I suggest, been the apparent confusion of a profession changing course, and only recently has it been possible to see in what direction it is now pointed as well as some of the snags and difficulties that lie ahead. One thing is clear: that the main changes are coming about because of the reworking and rethinking of educational psychologists who have become grossly dissatisfied with traditional practice. Certainly recent legislative and administrative changes have had an effect on the nature of psychologists’ work: these changes are well summarised by Wright (1976); but new responsibilities do not have to be assumed in traditional ways. What is most striking about educational psychologists as a group is that, like women, they have become increasingly intolerant of the burden of traditional expectations. Instead of allowing themselves to continue to be formed by established social expectancies (to whose formation they have in the past contributed), they are actively redefining their role. This is not to deny the effects of changed circumstances that are making role changes possible. These changes are many and some of them are fairly eeneral.

Educational psychologists are part of a wider group who have taken a basic first degree course in psychology (although not all educational psychologists have, in fact, done this). In most universities this basic course still mainly aims to provide a grounding in experimental psychology and research methods: in so far as it can be said to have a career orientation it is in the direction of becoming a research worker in experimental psychology; there are relatively few such posts which means that, for most professional psychologists, there is no detailed carry over of content and method into their working lives. For the most part they cannot be ‘applied’ psychologists because much of the psychology they have learnt is irrelevant to the problems they are faced with, or else incapable of application. This poses real difficulties for the practitioner psychologist who has to develop ways of coping and some of these may be rather makeshift: of this he has usually been somewhat ashamed and, for his pains, looked down on by the university departments who failed to equip him adequately in the first place, e.g. the head of a psychology department quoted in the Summerfield Report (DES, 1968) who suggested that educational psychologists were typically seen as ‘intuitionists and ex-teachers with green fingers’. Such a comment sums up a fairly general attitude in the sixties. The phenomenon of the seventies has been the greatly improved confidence and status of practitioner psychology in contrast to academic psychology in general, and experimental psychology in particular. It would not be overly dramatic to say that academic psychology seems to have lost its nerve, and is busy putting on an applied face to conceal its uncertainties. It is a truly amazing change to those who have lived through it.

Those areas of academic psychology which are currently the most popular are those with most relevance to everyday life — social, developmental and phenomenological psychology. It was precisely these aspects of the subject which the ‘hard science’ psychology of the early sixties neglected: the status activities of that time were natural science style experimental psychology and the computer simulation of psychological processes. In particular much was hoped for the latter which were going to create ‘models of man’ and even to be ‘the first true saints’ — because passionless. But as Neisser (1976) has recently reminded us it is passion and purpose, social influence and growth that are the distinctive features of human psychology.

The high status areas in the academic psychology of the early sixties suffered a severe reverse in their fortunes within the same decade. It was not just that such activities became less valued but that they failed within their own terms. The basic ‘objective’ methodology of experimental psychology proved to have its own social psychology, to be enormously vulnerable to the expectations of the experimenter and his subjects (Rosenthal, 1966), as well as incapable of resolving theoretical questions formulated in its own terms (Howarth, 1975). Human psychology proved disconcertingly difficult to simulate even in the area of so-called ‘logical’ processes and it became clear that the principles of organisation and discrimination were very different in man and machine. Attempts to simulate language production resulted in sentences that read like ambiguous telegrams. Great labours produced small results. A research programme at the University of Edinburgh attempted to simulate visual processes: at the end of three years and £30,000 the computer could tell a cup from a saucer; and it took eight minutes to do it.* A lot of expectations collapsed and at a time when the attitude in society at large towards academic research was distinctly critical. By the early seventies the new priorities were clear: the man with something to offer and something to say was the practitioner, or at least the applied psychologist; the general concern was to get in on the act.

* I am grateful to Professor Richard Gregory for permission to quote this selfmocking remark made at the inaugural meeting of the BPS Developmental Psychology Section in October 1972; Professor Gregory adds that the computer could recognise the cup from any angle — provided that the handle was in view.

If I appear to labour this point it is because I see it as an important one. Educational psychologists are human beings too: if they perceive themselves as having greater value and status that increases their confidence — and their ability to change. A defensive stance is also an inflexible one: it requires self-confidence to be self-questioning.

Of course, the educational psychologist’s reappraisal, like the selfdoubts of the academic psychologist, does not arise from purely internal professional concerns. To some extent they both arise out of a heightened awareness of economic and moral responsibility for the positions we occupy, the activities we engage in — and the comfortable salaries we draw: it is the age of accountability. In this process cost-effectiveness ranks high. Even allowing for the tough-mindedness induced by the economic recession of recent years it is clear that we cannot afford further expansion of medical and social services as they are at present constituted. An expansion policy based on what Andrew Sutton (1976) calls ‘more of the same’ is not going to be tolerated except in cases of proven effectiveness (see Chapter 10). The consequences of the expansion during the economic boom of the sixties are well summarised by Midwinter (1977):

Between 1961 and 1974 employment of full and part-time workers by local authorities rose by 54%, by central government 9%... Many of the extra jobs have gone to administrators instead of to the people who deal with patients or children or clients. Between 1965 and 1973 the administrative staff in the NHS hospitals increased by 51% while the number of beds occupied fell away. In just four years NHS administrative and clerical staff grew by 31% and medical staff by only 19.7%. The same kind of thing has been happening in education. Only half of the 1,453,000 people employed by local authorities in education are actually teachers. Over the years employment of this kind has been deliberately extended, rather than in productive capacity industries, because there was little or no need for heavy capital investment - it has been a politico-economic rather than a social series of decisions.

He continues:

I gaze half-benignly on cuts in public expenditure. If those cuts can mean ... the properly directed deprofessionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of our public services and the controlled mobilisation of community resources, then I am convinced the overall quality of services would be improved. Gone is the time when management or labour can claim that a service automatically deteriorates if expenditure is reduced.

The paper from which these quotations are taken was given in London in October 1976; since then I think you could add a few turns to the screw. In the same paper Midwinter relates the costly proliferation of the ‘helping’ services to the process of professionalisation. He suggests that, just about without exception, all groups ‘ have slavishly adhered to the historic fate mapped out for professions. They have become bureaucratised, defensive about manning and function, haunted by false fears of “dilution”, jittery about evaluation and open accountability, jargon-plagued, status-conscious, and sheltering, in a pother of insecurity, behind a barricade of mystiques.’

The clear implication is that there is no security in such defensiveness. The encouraging thing about educational psychology is that the profession seems to be moving into a position of open accountability —linked to a more precise definition of the client.

Educational psychologists have, in the past, experienced some confusion as to just who their client is; it has sometimes seemed that the psychologist must be all things to all men. The present trend seems to be to make a distinction between the primary client, the child, and the secondary clients, who include the employing authority. The problem is to maintain this priority and I think this relates to the now more commonly expressed feeling amongst psychologists that, for professional purposes, they should be independent of education authorities. It is simple to affirm that co-operation with parents, teachers, educational administrators and the like, must be conditional on the child’s interests being served. Most of the time there is an effective identity of interest, but at times it is necessary for a child’s advocate to intervene in a process that is working against his client: it may be something as subtle as the process of defining a child as ‘maladjusted’ or ‘subnormal’ which, with no sinister intention, is none the less happening in a sinister fashion (see Chapter 5); or it may be something as flagrant as a ‘best fit’ school placement which is the best fit for the local authority but not for the child. These are not always easy things to resist but it is my strong impression that educational psychologists are increasingly willing to tackle this kind of issue.

This essentially moral attitude goes along with a greater willingness to work with parents and teachers as a colleague rather than as a consultant - an attitude which recognises the primary importance of those adults who have most to do with a child, and the primary effectiveness of altering what happens between an adult and a child — be it changes in teaching method, handling or attitude — to achieve changes for the child. It also recognises the absurdity of the psychologist as the man with the magic gift with children - he probably hasn’t got it and if he has he’s not around most of the time to use it. It puts a premium on talking language, ideas and techniques that people can use, because if they can’t it is unlikely that anything effective can be done.

In common with many other professions, including medicine, educational psychologists have become increasingly aware of the disadvantages of conspicuous professionalisation: it is a particular handicap for the psychologist. By the very nature of their trade educational psychologists can only really be effective through other people; which means that any ‘turn-offs’ in the form of status trappings and professional mystiques actually render them less effective — even if it does make them look more like members of traditional, established professions. Despite some hesitation in the recent past it seems that educational psychologists have the opportunity — and the inclination — to avoid the dread fate mapped out by Eric Midwinter and to reprofessionalise in a way which avoids the main dangers of professionalism. Accountability is at the heart of it.

In a sense both economic and moral accountability are one: they both demand that the psychologist should be able to do something; even moral attitudes are empty if nothing happens. Certainly a barrage of statistics about work-loads and increasing areas of responsibility cuts no ice. Hawks’ (1971) comment about clinical psychologists is relevant here: ‘Too often clinical psychologists offer as justification of what they are doing, the fact that they are over-worked doing it;less often can it be claimed that what they are doing is known to have some beneficial effect.’

This dilemma has increasingly preoccupied educational psychologists during the past two or three years and the desire for greater effectiveness has led to major changes in role definition. The main directions of change seem to be these:

• — decreasing emphasis on individual work with children individually referred;
• — increasing emphasis on indirect methods of helping children’s learning problems and problems of social adjustment — through the organisation, policy and structure of schools, through the attitudes and behaviour of adults towards children;
• — increasing emphasis on preventive work through educational screening and courses for parents and teachers — encouraging them to carry out their own assessment and remediation procedures.

Very broadly speaking educational psychologists are becoming less clinical and more educational which means there are problems of adjustment to other professional groups, such as educational advisers, who sometimes feel that psychologists are invading their territory by taking an interest in school organisation and curriculum reform, instead of confining their attention to individual ‘cases’. There can be no more simple index of the drift of change than these demarcation disputes: ten years ago the role conflict would have been with medical officers and child psychiatrists.

But the brake on progress is not such territorial disputes, which are really of a minor character, but the weight of child guidance traditions which psychologists still trail behind them (see Chapters 2 and 11). Nearly half a century of child guidance has not proved easy to throw off. In a very real sense the story of child guidance is a kind of tragedy. I know of nothing that conveys this more clearly than the article by Olive Sampson published in the mid-seventies and entitled ‘A dream that is dying?’, in which she wrote about the personal and professional sacrifices of those who supported child guidance in its early days. It was an investment in something that we can now see as bound to fail: few of us would disagree with Tizard’s (1973) judgement of child guidance as ‘wrongly conceived’. It was not just that children who were seen by the child guidance team derived no more enduring benefit than those who were not, or who declined treatment; nor that it only saw a minority of children with problems and excluded some categories altogether. Its failure was even more basic than that. Writing in 1972 Kingsley Whitmore observed: ‘The child guidance service is often thought of as a preventive service and it was the dream of the pioneer clinics that they would reduce the incidence of mental disorder in children. This dream has not really come true, for children only make contact with the service when a problem has arisen that their parents and/or teachers cannot manage.’ Child guidance failed at many levels but the foundation of its failure was the way in which it recruited its clients: ineffectual individual treatment was merely a corollary of this.

With increasing momentum during the past ten years, and particularly since local government reorganisation in 1974, school psychological services have been abstracting themselves physically and administratively from child guidance. But they have tended to take many of the old practices with them, including the most basic one — the individual crisis-driven referral which usually goes to that all-embracing practitioner, the waiting list, whose therapeutic cure is time.

When over half of the School Psychological Services in England and Wales had only one educational psychologist and only 15 per cent had more than four (Summerfield Report, op. cit.), it seemed sensible to ascribe the long lists of children waiting to be seen to chronic undermanning. Yet ten years after Summerfield, services that have trebled or quadrupled in size are finding themselves in an identical situation. The obvious lesson is that you cannot beat the open-ended waiting list, even if it were worthwhile doing so. It is possible, by sprinting from school to school (and giving what Topping (1977) describes as ‘emergency reading and intelligence tests’), to keep the vanishing tail of the waiting list in sight, even if forever out of reach. But the rapid processing of referrals does mean that the psychologist usually has little time for more than the reflex activity of ‘testing’.

Even where the waiting list phenomenon is being subverted or brought under control, the social obligation to test is proving difficult to avoid. I have a suspicion that many of the individual intelligence tests given by psychologists these days are given because they cannot avoid doing them: it is difficult to battle against tacit (or explicit) expectations. You cannot give a lecture on mental testing theory to every co-professional who asks for a report. Teachers, social workers, doctors, administrators know what a psychological report is, they’ve been seeing them for years — it is a test report with the results in a little box at the top: they must be rather bewildered by the psychologist's change of attitude.

Routine testing is, for the psychologist, the corollary of the traditional individual referral, the expected response. To borrow from George Orwell’s parable: you are known as the man with the gun and you have to shoot the rogue elephant that has been found for you; your feelings of futility, your sense that this is not your decision, is of no avail. Other people locate the problems for you and require you to deal with them in the way they have come to expect. Like Orwell’s experience as a colonial administrator, the educational psychologist’s role discomfort is due to the unself-critical, confident performance of those who have gone before him or, more ironical still, his own earlier days. The trap of testing expectations is not just that it involves him in doing things he may doubt the meaning or use of, but also that it shackles him to individual tests that are usually ‘restricted’ and can only be given by a qualified educational psychologist: it is part of the professional fate outlined by Eric Midwinter.

The individual referral and the individual test have as their inevitable consequence that most impossible (but persistent) expectation, the individual cure. It is, of course, an expectation originally created by a remote clinic and mysterious treatments. Two things, I suggest, have saved the school psychologist from conspicuous and ignominious failure in this respect, both of which cast an interesting light on the credulity and superstition of head-teachers. One is the rarity of the psychologist’s visits which, to the hopeful, invest his most ordinary comments and actions with special significance; the other is that mos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Prefatory note
• Foreword
• 1. Directions of Change
• 2. The Historical Development of School Psychological Services
• 3. Personal View: Three Interviews
• 4. Medical and Psychological Concepts of Problem Behaviour
• 5. Deviance: The Interactionist Approach
• 6. The Failure of Psychometrics
• 7. Community Psychology
• 8. Schools’ Systems Analysis: A Project-Centred Approach
• 9. Your Service: Whose Advantage?
• 10. The Psychologist’s Professionalism and the Right to Psychology
• 11. The Process of Reconstruction: An Overview
• References
• Contributors
• Index