Psychologist may help pupils

Greater access to child psychologists may help prevent more pupils being excluded from school, a report says.

Worcestershire County Council is recommended to train more educational psychologists.

Officers say in the report, to be discussed by Tuesday's health overview and scrutiny committee , that many schools said support they get when dealing with children with challenging behaviour is insufficient or too slow.

A number of heads have said quicker access to support might have enabled them to solve a pupil's difficult behaviour before the need to resort to suspensions and exclusions.

One head was concerned that although his school was now admitting an increasing number of asylum seeker and refugee pupils from areas of conflict, there was no extra funding to enable the school to deal with pupils with emotional difficulties.

Officers recommend schools be given extra funds to develop their own solutions to problems and decide at which stage to buy in the services of psychologists, either via the local authority or elsewhere.

This, they claim, would enable schools to get the right help at the right time and to help with earlier diagnosis of problems to help avoid costly intervention at a later date.

Because of a national shortage of educational psychologists, officials have recommended that the council could look at supporting appropriately qualified staff to train for such posts through the University of Worcester.