Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will launch a consultation on the potential merits of schools having a named educational psychologist based in their local authority.

The department values the critical role educational psychologists play in the support available to children and young people, including those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). The deployment of educational psychology services is the responsibility of local authorities as the employers of educational psychology services.

The department is taking measures to support education settings to have improved access to educational psychology services by investing in growing the pipeline. The department is investing over £21 million to train 400 more educational psychologists from this year. This builds on the £10 million currently being invested in the training of over 200 educational psychologists who began their training in September 2023. This investment will help to make specialist expertise more widely available in mainstream settings.