Information for Practitioners

The Educational Psychology Service provides a service for individual children using a consultation based approach. This means we are speaking to and advising the key adults around the child. There is significant evidence that a consultation approach, involving problem solving, identifying interventions and review, can have a very positive impact. Unfortunately we cannot offer this universally. We provide a tiered approach to our service delivery  which means we consider individual children who have been assessed already as at stage 2 of the Falkirk Council Staged Intervention Approach:

Stage 1 and 2 – online resources on this blog can be used to inform your assessment and intervention prior to involving educational psychology.

Stage 3 and above – the psychologists prioritise the involvement as per the list below and identify an Episode Type.

Prioritisation

We aim to be responsive as a service and so we do this through a prioritisation system.

A. Statutory requests from parents, young people or the Local Authority. These need to be responded to within specified timescales, usually 10 weeks for an assessment, and potentially 16 weeks, and will be accepted on the basis of the information provided.

Many requests from parents will be responded with a least intrusive approach (see How we work – Falkirk Educational Psychology Service).

B. Prioritised based on the information provide through Educational Psychology Request for Assistance – About – MyFalkirk:

    1. critical incidents – please contact the Principal Psychologist, or a psychologist working already with your school, as this often requires rapid resource re-deployment.
    2. children at risk of education placement breakdown
    3. children where there is evidence that high levels of adaptation are required
    4. assessment in relation to significant Additional Support Needs or placement
    5. children educated in Non-Falkirk Council schools with significant Additional Support needs
    6. exploratory Assessment to identify areas of concern

This means we need to see what the current assessment is from the school or referring agency. The portal is secure and documents ideally have passwords removed. Typically we would find the assessment information in a recent Form 4 and Form 6 helpful. You may have other reports or assessments, such as from Support for Learning, or Speech and Language Therapy. We are now at the stage where the up to date assessment information you provide is essential. You can upload up to 4 different documents with a total size of 20MB.

Please see About and How We Work

We are in the process of updating our Critical Incidents Guideline which will be issued shortly. In the meantime if you have a critical incident please inform the Heads and Director of Education. If looking for specific advice and support from the Educational Psychology Service please contact Nick Balchin directly or an EP working with your establishment.

Request for Assistance

Please use Educational Psychology Request for Assistance – About – MyFalkirk. This does have a consent process for parents. It is good practice to have spoken to them in advance. We cannot proceed without their consent. This process will also ask the parent or legal guardian to provide equalities monitoring information. It also allows us to communicate more effectively with them about our work.

How to request:

Educational Psychology Request for Assistance – About – MyFalkirk.

  1. follow the link to MyFalkirk
  2. sign in or register
  3. you will need – the details for the child and the legal guardian/parent, particularly their email address
  4. select what type of requester you are from the drop down menu
  5. select “yes” if the parent or legal guardian is aware. they will need to provide consent themselves. (there is a link on this page to the word version if they have difficulty)
  6. include details of the request, and what you are hoping for from this request now. it is now essential you upload supporting assessment information. The best format is PDF, but other formats are accepted. We are expecting that the Child’s Plan documents would be uploaded as a minimum (form 4 and form 6).
  7. please input the child details. please make sure the child’s details are accurate, especially the date of birth. This is used to help us match our records to children we have previously supported, and by the parent pr legal guardian in the consent stage.
  8. please input the details of at least one parent or legal guardian. It is essential to provide an an email address. please make sure this is the correct one. we have had a number of children’s request get stuck due to a small error in the email address as we cannot correct this at this stage.
  9. Please provide your details. your email address and phone number are required. These details will be emailed to the parent or legal guardian in case there is a problem, so please use the phone number and email address you are happy for them to contact you on. We in the service will also use these details to be back in touch with you so please make sure this is accurate and up to date.
  10. you will be given a summary of your request. please check all the details are correct.
  11. Click Submit – you will have a chance now to download a pdf of the request for your records.

Consent Form

In exceptional circumstances there may be a reason why a parent cannot provide consent through this system. In this case please download a consent form and send it to us once completed by uploading in the Educational Psychology Request for Assistance – About – MyFalkirk.

Form – Consent for Involvement with the Educational Psychology Service April 2025

What happens next?

The parent or legal guardian will be sent an email from MyFalkirk automatically, based on the details you have provided. This will ask them to check the detail of the child, the request, provide consent and ask them to provide equalities monitoring information. While Educational Psychology is a statutory service, we cannot provide a service without the parent, legal guardian, or child over 16 consenting.

Once consent is obtained all requests are considered at our allocations meeting. If there is sufficient information, and it is clear we can be a helpful service, we will assign a psychologist there and then, or add them to a waiting list, depending on the evidence for prioritising as described above and our capacity. Some children will be declined a service at this stage.

An email will be sent to confirm this

Assigned Psychologist

The Assigned Psychologist will review the information and open an Episode of Involvement. They may need to speak to the requester or parent at this early stage, as when they open the Episode they will set a goal. We will try to minimise the number of different psychologists working in any one school or ELC. It is most likely a Team Around the Child would be the first step. The psychologist can have a richer discussion about the key issues and together the group can identify positive strategies and methods to try. In some cases additional assessment by the psychologist be be required. The psychologist can describe what methods those would be. In either case a follow up meeting will be arranged in most circumstances, where the impact of the agreed strategies, or the additional assessment, can be discussed and analysed.

Waiting List

The requests for assistance on the waiting list will be reviewed at each allocation meeting. This is new, so we cannot quite predict how long a wait to expect. Once we have more data we will publish it here. Our aim is not to have a long waiting list. We do need to prioritise work for the current period or term. Currently we are only using the waiting list for those requests which can be dealt with the following term.

We really want professionals to be prioritising the children for whom action from our service would be helpful now. Please try not to make requests simply to ensure the child is added to the waiting list.

Decline

If the Request for Assistance is declined we will provide an email indicating why we are declining at this stage. The two most common reasons are that there has been insufficient information (no additional information), or that the parent or legal guardian has not consented. We generally wait about two weeks for consent to come through, but mostly this has been due to there being an error in the inputting of details (such as child’s date of birth, or parent/guardian’s email address) or the parent/guardian not being informed to look out for the email. We also have had some technical problems in the first 10 days of the system going live.

If we can, based on the information provided, we will signpost to a more appropriate service, or suggest things to try at an earlier stage of intervention.

What of there are problems?

Please report any technical difficulties in using the site to EducationalPsychologyService@falkirk.gov.uk

In most cases the system is corrected overnight so please try again the next day. You may need to clear your cache/browser history or re-boot/update your own computer for it to synchronise properly, although this is rare.

Request for Training or Development Work

Please look at the Education Hub and CPD Manager for our current training offer. When practitioners identify areas for training that are not currently provided it is often the case that there is more practitioners identifying this same need. There is information on the training we have provided here. it may be that asking for one of these courses is what would help your team or organisation. We will develop new training if we have enough time to explore the needs and skill requirements of the audience. The Service proposes to have a new Smart request system by early 2026. In the meantime email the service EducationalPsychologyService@falkirk.gov.uk with “Request for Training” in the Subject line, outlining your request and your needs analysis.

Strategic Consultation

Psychologists offer Consultation and advice at school, cluster or authority level on a range of topics, such as school policy and practice on promoting inclusion, authority approaches on relationships and behaviour or a cluster review of barriers to school attendance affecting families.

These are collaborative problem solving fora where the needs of children and the trends or themes can be discussed at a more strategic level in order to consider how we might respond in ways that have a greater impact. It has assisted us in developing our priorities for training and development work since 2018/19.

We will be consulting with stakeholders on how we can achieve the aims of this type of service delivery as we move forward.

The aims include:

  1. having an overview of the range and profile of barriers to learning and Additional Support needs at a level beyond a single school to allow the EPS to prioritise its limited resources
  2. providing a forum for collaborative solutions to meeting children’s needs at a community level to assist in developing shared practice and expertise in a community

We continue to offer provide a service to the Falkirk Community Planning Partnership’s strategic groups.