Our Aims
Our objectives are to promote and support inclusion of all young people in our community. We aim to support children through:
- Consultation and advice provided to parents, professionals and voluntary organisations that have an interest in child development. Consultation is often a joint working process involving solution focused discussion with everybody present exploring and developing ideas and action points which should lead to positive change for the child.
- Assessment by an educational psychologist is a process which involves the gathering of information from a variety of sources in a range of settings over a period of time. This involves everybody important in the child’s life e.g. teachers, carers, other professionals and of course the child or young person themselves. The assessment can cover social, emotional, behavioural and cognitive factors in the child’s life.
- Interventions help children overcome any difficulties they may be experiencing. This could be counselling by the psychologist, video interaction guidance or a positive behaviour management programme.
- Training which psychologists provide for school staff, children and young people, parents and carers and other professionals. Training is given on many different topics relating to helping children e.g. motivation, learning styles and solution focused approaches.
- Research which psychologists are involved in aims to help us know which approaches and strategies work most effectively to help children and young people. Research also helps us to identify which areas to develop in our work with schools and others involved in education.
In addition to this pre-school home visiting teachers also offer a direct teaching service to pre-school children with significant additional support needs.
The Service is lead by the Principal Psychologist, Louise McLatchey , who is based in Inverness.
There are two Area Principal Psychologists. They are based in the North Area in Brora and the Mid West Area in Skye. The Area Principals manage small teams of psychologists and pre-school teachers. All schools and Associated School Groups have a liaison psychologist who can work directly with the pupils and school staff.
The pre-school teachers for children with Additional Support Needs within the Service are based with educational psychologists in the Area Teams. They work with younger children who have a variety of significant Additional Support Needs. Requests for involvement of a pre-school teacher generallly come through the Area Principal Educational Psychologist, or specialist Educational Psychologist, who will liaise closely with the appropriate pre-school teacher. The pre-school teaching team is co-ordinated by Barbara Simons who is based on Skye, in the Area E.C.S. office.