Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of educational psychologist provision in (a) Ellesmere Port and Neston constituency and (b) England.

Local authorities are responsible for the recruitment and deployment of educational psychologists.

The department does not collect data on the supply of educational psychologists at a constituency level. Data on the number of educational psychologists employed by local authorities is captured in our ‘School Workforce in England’ statistics, published in June 2022. This is available here: https://content.explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/api/releases/9a34fd81-bbaa-46ca-b5d5-e24c67a15d4d/files/18a597bd-40da-436a-58d0-08da7ec3a78e.

In November 2022, the department announced that funding worth £21 million would go towards training 400 more educational psychologists. The first of these cohorts will graduate and join the workforce in 2026, to provide crucial support to children and young people, schools, families, and local authorities. This new funding, in place from 2024, builds on the £10 million announced earlier this year to train over 200 educational psychologists from September 2023.