Update: March 2025
Educational Psychology Early Intervention Services
The Educational Psychology service continues to balance the statutory requirements for Education Health and Care needs assessments with the demand for early intervention support. Educational Psychologists play a critical role in both areas, and while statutory assessments remain the highest priority, early intervention work contributes to inclusive school communities, as well as supporting children’s needs before they escalate.
The Educational Psychology Service has some capacity to provide early intervention services to schools for delivery from September 2025. This will be available for purchase on the Devon Education Services shop from 22nd April.
The support includes two offers.
1. School review consultation
- Focused on addressing whole-school priorities and challenges regarding SEND and inclusion.
- Includes collaborative discussions with multi-agency representatives, considering evidence-based interventions at various levels.
- Helps to identify the needs of vulnerable groups, create action plans, and outline additional services.
- Provided free of charge as part of the Inclusive Communities core offer.
2. Psychology Works Services
- Whole school strategic planning using person centred tools to aid whole school and staff development.
- Evidenced based consultation to identify needs, problem solve, create shared goals and intervention plans.
- Tailored training on diverse subjects, designed to meet settings’ needs.
- Individual or group supervision available to support staff well-being and promote effective decision-making.
- Services are purchasable (primary schools: up to 2 days, secondary/special schools: up to 4 days)
All mainstream schools and Local Authority maintained/academy/Free Special schools can make a request for support. Demand is likely to outstrip capacity meaning that we cannot guarantee that all requests will be fulfilled. We understand that some schools and settings will be disappointed that they won’t be able to access EP support in the short term. The EP service is working hard to balance early intervention support alongside reducing waiting times for children and young people undergoing statutory assessment.
Over time, EP support will be rolled out to more schools and settings
We look forward to working with you.
Dr Rachel Hearn
Head of Educational Psychology Service and Specialist Support
SEND support for Devon schools and settings currently available
SEND and inclusion support for schools is provided by a range of different services, working in different ways to respond to every school’s unique situation.
The SEND and inclusion specialist support services’ advice, teaching and support for children and young people with SEND can be accessed through our Request for SEND Support form.
SEND Support consultations for schools: An opportunity to book a 30-minute TEAMS conversation with a multi-professional group consisting of SEND advisory teachers, Educational Psychologists and managers from the Statutory SEND team.
Please do ask us for support. We will be happy to work with you – perhaps to implement the ideas and evidence-based approaches selected below?
The Educational Psychology Service and SEND Support Service have collaborated to highlight the most relevant resources to support areas of need raised recently.
These are focused on support in schools. Many also have information that is useful for supporting children at home or learning more about a specific area of need, such as cognition and learning.
Highlighted SEND resources
Communication and interaction
- Linking language and learning and developmental language disorder (DLD)
- Supporting SLCN in primary schools and secondary schools
- Autism and girls
- Supporting transition for pupils with SLCN pre-school to primary and primary to secondary
- Sensory processing
- Autism Education Trust resources
Cognition and learning
- Overcoming barriers to learning – differentiation and scaffolding and mediation
- Independent learning and organisational skills and executive functioning
- Attention and concentration and memory and processing
- Literacy and understanding children and young people with literacy difficulties
- Maths and understanding children and young people with mathematics difficulties
Sensory and physical
- Moving and Handling
- Top tips for hearing impairment inclusion,
- Top tips for visual impairment inclusion
- Transition passport
Social, emotional and mental health
- Support for vulnerable children in care
- Understanding the link between language and social, emotional and mental health
- Managing anxiety and anxiety and dysregulation
- Child on parent aggression
- Relational learning to promote healthy emotional regulation
- Supporting children with challenging difficulties