Educational Psychology Service

Psychology services

Therapeutic work

Services for educational settings

Yeomans Psychology and Teaching offers psychology services for a range of educational settings:

Schools
Pre school and early years settings
Further Educations settings

Services offered to all settings cover both universal and targeted provision for children and young people.

Examples of the type of service offered include:

Individual assessment with follow up where recommendations are made to inform future action
Therapeutic work with individuals or groups. Dr Yeomans is trained in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Motivational Interviewing and Drawing and Talking. Please see the therapeutic work page of this website for more information. Click on the button to go to this page

Consultations with staff
Supervision of staff in key roles within school (for example, learning or behaviour mentors, nurture group staff). See the supervision page for more information
Staff training. Dr Yeomans can offer a range of training packages related to meeting the individual needs of children and young people. She is an ICAN Licensed trainer for Early Talk Boost and Talk Boost. More details on the training page; click on the button

Services for parents

Yeomans Psychology and Teaching will consider requests for assessment or therapy from parents. Ideally an assessment of a child or young person requested by a parent will involve contact with their school or setting in order to make sure that a complete picture is obtained. Please contact Dr Jane Yeomans to discuss your specific requirements.

What's distinctive about the psychology service offered by Yeomans Psychology and Teaching?

All work carried out is responsive to the particular needs of the child or young person, taking account of the impact of their educational setting and family circumstances. There isn't a 'one size fits all' approach.

Yeomans Psychology and Teaching offers an innovative approach to the assessment of children and young people's learning. This assessment is not just about learning difficulties, but it can also give useful information about their social and emotional development too.

Many educational settings and parents want a cognitive assessment of the child or young person. This will often lead to use of an IQ test. IQ tests can fall into the category of 'one size fits all' because they assume that:

intelligence is something that is fixed (so it can't change)
intelligence is made up of a set of abilities
it is possible to measure these abilities

So what tends to happen is that the IQ test produces a set of scores about so called underlying abilities but which don't tell us anything much about how best to help the individual. IQ tests have been criticised because they don't take account of things like cultural differences. This means that a child or young person could take an IQ test and achieve a low score because they are unfamiliar with some of the content of the test, not because they are less intelligent than others.

Dr Jane Yeomans offers an innovative approach to assessment that is responsive to individual needs and which makes direct links between assessment and intervention. This innovative approach combines a scored assessment of the child or young person's cognitive processing using the Cognitive Abilities System, Dynamic Assessment and curriculum based assessment. Depending on the presenting concerns and needs, the assessment might also include some exploration of curriculum based attainments and the too form part of the overall picture of the child or young person. Very often when children and young people are struggling with the school curriculum (particularly with the basic skills of language, literacy and numeracy), their difficulties are related to poor cognitive process and lack of effective learning to learn skills.

The Cognitive Abilities System (CAS)

Dr Yeomans carries out assessment of cognitive processing using a test called the Cognitive Assessment System (CAS). The CAS was developed by Dr Jack Naglieri and is based on his theory called PASS. PASS stands for Planning, Attention, Simultaneous and Successive.

The points below say a bit more about each area.

Planning: a cognitive process requiring the individual to determine, select, and use a strategy to solve a problem. The individual develops a plan of action, monitors its effectiveness, revises the plan as things change and controls impulses so that they think before acting;
Attention: a cognitive process requiring the individual to selectively attend to a particular stimulus and inhibits attending to competing stimuli;
Simultaneous: a cognitive process involving integrating separate stimuli into a single whole or group;
Successive: a cognitive process requiring the serial ordering of things, so order and sequence are important.

'The four PASS processes are concepts that are used to describe how people think, learn and solve all kinds of problems. These processes are involved in reading, writing and doing math [sic], as well as everyday activities such as driving a car or cooking a dinner.' (From: Helping Children to Learn by Jack Naglieri and Eric Pickering).

The theory of cognitive processing that underpins this test means that as well as producing scores, (which in a small number of cases might be useful; for example, when a school needs to provide evidence related to Local Authority criteria for access to funding or provision and these criteria are in part made up of test scores) there are direct links to curriculum areas and suggestions for strategies and approaches that can help to improve the child or young person's processing abilities.

Dynamic Assessment

The page about DA gives more detailed information, click to find out more.

In summary, DA is an interactive approach to assessment. This means that part of the assessment involves teaching the pupil in order to find out what strategies and approaches help him or her to perform at a higher level. Therefore, an assessment using DA will use the teaching to identify the next steps of learning, making a much closer link between assessment and intervention.

Curriculum based assessment

Where there are concerns about a child or young person's attainments, some curriculum based assessment will also be carried out. The particular assessments will depend on specific concerns, but would often include an examination of progress in basic skills.

How does this assessment approach to assessment help with social, emotional and mental health and challenging behaviour?

Cognitive processing underpins all aspects of development. It's not just about learning basic skills. Many cognitive processes are relevant to social and emotional development. Here are some examples:

Cause and effect thinking, related to seeing the consequences of one's actions: what will happen if I do/say..........?
Being impulsive. Many children and young people act first and think afterwards, which can lead them into trouble......
Being able to weigh up the pros and cons of a particular course of action
Looking at something from another perspective (how does.....feel?)

Dynamic Assessment can help to shed some light on the reasons for difficult or challenging behaviour. Part of an intervention might be to focus on helping children and young people to become better thinkers, which in turn can help in things like taking responsibility for their actions.