1997 - 98 Reports

The Professional Development Programme (PDP) is managed by the Association of Scottish Principal Educational Psychologists (ASPEP) in collaboration with Local Authorities and funded by the Scottish Office Education and Industry Department. This is the third cycle of the Programme, which involves groups of psychologists in cross-boundary project work and other professional development activities, around agreed themes, over a period of about one year. The outcomes from this work are disseminated to colleagues and others in the field of education. This booklet gives a summary of the activities and findings of the three themes addressed by the 1997-98 programme, namely:

• ADHD
• The Children (Scotland) Act 1995
• Exclusions and Indiscipline

The group studying ADHD examined three aspects of this complex area offering practical and reasoned advice to educational psychologists. The three areas covered included:

1. parents perspectives of the process of identification and follow-up of their children's difficulties. They looked at the roles of the different agencies involved in the assessment, examples of different assessment facilities and early school provision for the children;
2. a comparison study between children previously diagnosed as ADHD and a control set of classmates using published indicators and their own observation schedule, together with class teacher questionnaires;
3. the third area involved the children's own views of their condition, medication and their school experiences using individual interviews and comparing these with the views of teachers who knew them well.

This group focussed on both a reflective study of the legislation, including the way that the new Act sits with the Education(Scotland) Act, and experiences of helping their own local authorities implement the Children Act. This included participation in working groups collaborating on inter-agency planning, acting as consultants to local authorities and highlighting gaps in service planning. Experiences across the five local authorities represented were shared and reported.

This topic had a high level of current interest and was addressed in three parts:

1. the creation of a computerised database for monitoring both the behaviour support and exclusions carried out at school and local authority level;
2. an examination of the role of multi-disciplinary forums in offering support to children at risk of exclusion;
3. an examination of how, and if, children and parents were actively involved in the processes of support to pupils at risk of exclusion across different schools.

The group concluded with a set of recommendations to take the study forward with an emphasis on inclusion.