Leadership seminar series with an educational psychology service
Situation
The Educational Psychology team works in a demanding environment shaped by increasing need, constrained resources and system-wide change. Staff deliver complex work across multiple layers, including consultation-led support to schools, responding to critical incidents, leading trauma-informed initiatives and contributing to strategic projects. Many take up leadership in practice, often without formal authority but with significant influence.
Leaders within the service saw the need to support the team to step back from the demands of day-to-day work. They wanted to create space for reflection, help the team develop a shared frame for understanding their roles and the systems they work within, and strengthen their capacity to lead. This was grounded in a deep commitment to improving outcomes for children, young people and families.
Our approach
We designed a programme built around the academic year which included a five-part Seminar Series, integrated into the team’s regular meetings. Drawing on systems-psychodynamic principles, each seminar offered a facilitated space for reflective inquiry and systemic thinking, tailored to the realities of Educational Psychology practice.
The sessions combined theoretical input with live exploration of organisational dilemmas. Topics included core concepts of the systems-psychodynamic approach, group dynamics, social defences in organisations, and working with change, loss and uncertainty. The final session drew the themes together, supporting application to the service context. The series aimed to build shared language, develop leadership capacity and strengthen reflective practice within a psychologically minded frame.
Impact
I think the power of the concepts- how when stuck – if we start to curiously explore these ideas it can really help to unpick what could be going on…
I have used the learning in my staff supervision work and to reflect on address issues that I have identified within complex systems…
Very engaging sessions which were well paced. Lots of new information for some people and I think the activities helped everyone join together, collaborate and develop a team shared language…
Feedback from evaluation surveys
The sessions provided space to think beneath the surface of their work and offered a shared frame for making sense of the systems they operate in.
This work has not only deepened the team’s reflective capacity but also enhanced their ability to think systemically about the contexts in which children, young people and families live and learn. By strengthening reflexivity across the service, the programme supports more joined-up, psychologically informed approaches to complex organisational dilemmas, with long-term benefit for the communities the service supports.