What is child psychology like to study? | with the University of Sussex

Want to improve the wellbeing of children and young people and make a positive difference to their future? Then the Masters in Applied Child Psychology at the University of Sussex is for you. Senior lecturer Dave Smalley explains how the course will enhance your employability by providing practical skills and cutting edge research

Participants

• Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ
• Dr Dave Smalley - senior lecturer in psychology, University of Sussex

Transcript

Dr Dave Smalley: So it's the ideal course for anyone who knows that they enjoy psychology, knows they want to support children and young people, and kind of wants to develop that a bit further, there's an opportunity to both broaden your horizons and to acquire knowledge, skills and experience that will enhance your employability prospects when you do decide whatever you want to specialise in.

Emily Slade: Hello and welcome back to Future You, the podcast brought to you by graduate careers experts, prospects. I'm your host Emily Slade and in this episode we discuss the Applied Child Psychology MSc course available from the University of Sussex.

Dr Dave Smalley: Hi. My name is Dave Smalley. I'm a senior lecturer at the University of Sussex, and about 18 months ago or so, I was asked to create a new Masters course in applied child psychology. So I'm also the course convener for that, and have been kind of involved developing it from the ground up.

Emily Slade: Amazing. So what is applied child psychology.

Dr Dave Smalley: Applied child psychology is effectively, as you can probably tell it refers to the application of psychology, psychology research specifically to inform practices that can improve outcomes for children and young people. So this can be a whole range of different things. Can it's very broad. It might just be actually identifying what the key areas for concern are. It could be developing and applying assessment methods that allow us to gather some useful, objective information about the child, to understand what's going on or about their social network, their environment. So it's important to remember that the child doesn't necessarily see the world in the same way as we do, and they can't communicate about it in the same way that we might. So this is a really important thing when we're thinking of working with children. It also involves developing and evaluating interventions or prevention strategies, critically evaluating the effectiveness of those, but also critically evaluating things like government policy and pre existing practices, rather than just continuing to roll out the same stuff that's not working, evaluating what's working, what's not, and making suggestions for how we can continually improve. So the course introduces students to the contemporary or current issues that we face, relevant in child psychology. So students will, after they kind of got this overview, will then delve deeper into the main areas of application, well established areas of application of psychology that improve outcomes for children, those are education, home, on the family and mental health, and by covering all those different bits, students develop this holistic understanding of the key areas that contribute to a child's well being, because they all Interplay right in practice, holistic understanding is extremely valuable as much of the work that applied psychologists do requires that multi agency working across these major domains, especially for complex cases. So it's the ideal course for anyone who knows that they enjoy psychology, knows they want to support children and young people, and kind of wants to develop that a bit further, there's an opportunity to both broaden your horizons and to acquire knowledge, skills and experience that will enhance your employability prospects when you do decide whatever you want to specialise in. So there's that that's the kind of major going down the Applied Psychology route, but there's also significant research methods component to the course, including a dissertation project or thesis that students focus on in the summer term. This gives you the opportunity to be involved, actually get involved in doing cutting Ed research, or maybe to explore your own areas of interest. So you might get involved with a member of faculty who's doing a current project that could be shaping government policy, and you can get involved and collect data and analyse some of the data on that. So those opportunities are there, there too. You'll also have the opportunity to learn how to use a coding language, which can have huge employability benefits that, again, distinguish us, distinguishes us from other courses. But it's worth mentioning that we've taken a novel teaching approach, like we've developed it for this year, we've created an alternative research methods option that students can choose to do instead, so you can kind of go down that kind of more heavy researcher route and open up doors that way, or you can really say, no, definitely, I'm not that that confident with all of my statistical analysis stuff. Actually. Thank you. I want to be an applied psychologist. I want to know what I need to know for that. So, so we've really tried to be flexible so that we can offer a learning experience suited to the long term aspirations of each student, rather than just saying, this is the way we do things, okay. And you can also expect to do a lot of reflecting on your own experiences. I think one of my favourite activities that I do, actually, is just ask students, what's wrong with education. And if you want something that's going to impassion people, that question really seems to do it. And, you know, the whole room is in uproar and people are kind of talking and sharing, and you just, you can see there's a lot of positive stuff that comes out of it, and people are passionate about this sort of stuff. So you can, you know, this is relevant to everyone, and you can expect a lot of reflecting on those experiences, sharing with them, hearing about diversity of experiences for people with other countries and cultures. You know, we want students of all nationalities and backgrounds to feel welcome on this course, and that's one of the ways that we do it.

Emily Slade: What role does psychology play in supporting children?

Dr Dave Smalley: Psychology has got a very key, key role to play in supporting children. Ranges from kind of intensive support from applied psychologists, right? So if you've got someone with very acute needs, maybe special educational needs and disabilities, for example, you will often have lots of psychologists around them. You have someone from cams child and adolescent mental health services, you might have someone, an educational psychologist, that looks at their education. You might have someone working in social services, someone that's involved in understanding their home or wider social environment. So you know, there's a lot of psychologists all around that team supporting them, but as I've already mentioned, as well, psychologists have a role to play in things like shaping policy as well. It's not just through the psychologists themselves, and also kind of, you know, changing and shaping, shaping practice. There's also a really big role for psychology in industry and business. When we think about children, a lot of people don't realise that a lot of toys are made of consultations with psychologists. And one of the biggest growing businesses at the moment, of course, is edtech, thinking about artificial intelligence that all fits into it as well generative AI for educational technology and also, kind of developing edtech in a way that, you know, without another human being necessarily needing to even be there, you can actually support and develop the education of that child. So it's, it's a very diverse application of psychology. But, you know, another thing to think about is that there's a huge growing number of professions dedicated to the end of psychology and supporting children. So we don't know quite how diverse and comprehensive the support of psychology might be, but we do know that it's got a critical and very well established role to play in supporting children's well being.

Emily Slade: Absolutely. So the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex is renowned for its research and its impact. So how does this feed into the course?

Dr Dave Smalley: Well, first, it's probably worth explaining that the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex is very large. We have almost 100 faculty, and each has their own special area of expertise and experience. And what that means is that you'll have the opportunity to talk to a huge range of internationally respected researchers. What people don't understand is that when you kind of really get into a niche area, there are only two or three people that really understand so you are literally talking to the cutting edge of research when you're when you're talking to these people. So all of those opportunities, everyone always has an open door. You know, you're always welcome to kind of knock and talk to these, these people about what they do. So there's, there's really nice kind of benefit, I think that the research intensity at Sussex brings, therefore, to our postgraduate students as well. So you have, you know, you have all the benefits that that large cohort brings to the school. But there are also probably two key ways that our strength of our research benefits students. One is that when you're taught, so you have the opportunities to go and chat to these people, and, you know, that's really exciting in its own right. But also, you're taught by a member of faculty with significant expertise in the area, so that means that they have very up to date understanding of the topic area, and it really, you know, it gives you opportunities to learn about or even get involved with research that's going on, you know, right now. You can't read about it in textbooks. You can't read about it in a book, because it's not been published yet. It's going on right now. So that's a massive strength. So for example, just thinking about some of our teaching faculty, Ella Skelton, who's going to be the module convener for contemporary issues in child psychology on the course, she is doing lots of research at the moment on the link between children's learning and exposure to nature. Emma Howell is doing some evaluative work on how services respond to domestic violent abuse in families, so we learn about that as well. Katie Chisholm is doing some stuff and protective factors for mental health in adolescents across neurodiverse populations. So you know, really important, really kind of cutting edge stuff that you get to, you get to find out about. But another thing to say is that when you come to do a final year research project, and when you can decide what it is that you want to focus on having so many different faculty available to consult with that you could potentially work with, means that you can find the thing that's really right for you, that really interests you, that you find, you know, really passionate about. And there's, you know, there's likely to be someone with sufficiently similar interests to be able to work with you on that. So it provides great diversity and opportunity too.

Emily Slade: Yeah, I just wanted to loop that ground and ask an offbeat question you mentioned about changing policy, like literal government policy. How does one go about that? Do you just sort of pitch it to your fellow psychologists and then you, like, write to the government, like, just out of interest, how does that work?

Dr Dave Smalley: I think there'd be a lot of letters to the government.

Emily Slade: (laughs) Yeah.

Dr Dave Smalley: I suppose it's, it's not too far off. So typically, what happens a piece of policy might come out, and it's the government might themselves fund some research to explore whether it's being effective and whether it needs to be shaped or changed in any way. So it could put a call out, and various researchers kind of bid for that call and then go and do that research. But there's other ways as well. So when I mean, if you think about those sorts of contexts, it can be difficult for a researcher to say this bit of government policy isn't working. So you will typically have critiques of that research that come out and alternative pieces of research that come out that maybe display a different perspective. So you might have a thematic literature review that takes all the literature that's related to this policy to make some sort of an overall judgment about whether it's effective or not, what directions it might go in. You know, what, what future thoughts we should have, and that will feed into changing government policy. You know, when the government when something's clearly not working, there's clear evidence that it's not working, and the government says, Okay, we need a new white paper. We need to think about how we're going to change education. For example. To work a bit more effectively. Someone will be brought in to spearhead that, and that person will be looking at all of this research. It's not just a case of writing to the government. It's about a case of building up our knowledge of what works, and we continue to grow. We continue to learn more about what's effective and what isn't. So hopefully we continuing to improve all the time.

Emily Slade: Yeah, that's really interesting. Thank you. The summary of your course refers to the opportunity to work with data from real life Applied Psychology practice. So can you explain a little bit on what that involves?

Dr Dave Smalley: Yes, yeah. Okay, so I mean, the entire course has been designed to have a really distinct applied focus. So a focus on exploring the intersection between the research that I've talked about and applied practice. So you know, if you are an applied psychologist, you don't just decide to do stuff off a whim. You have a look at the research behind it, see what seems to work according to evidence, and develop your understanding that way, right? So, so we're constantly when we're thinking about how to deliver the course to our students, we're thinking about how that research and application things interact, and how we can get students involved in experiencing some of that interaction. One of the ways is as students learn about the application of psychology to key public domains like education, mental health, family and social services, they'll also be introduced to key professional frameworks, tools, policy that is relevant to that specific area. Okay, that's important because that allows you to you know, you're looking at the research and understanding developing knowledge of applied child psychology, but you're also seeing how an applied psychologist uses that information through by means of those tools and what have you, and experiencing them yourselves. So you have the opportunity to use professional assessment tools to play with an Intelligence Scale for children, or understand how neurodiversity is diagnosed, understand how an interview gets carried out, how an observation works like diagnostic interviews. There's loads and loads of different assessment approaches that clinical that all applied psychologists use, and you'll have an opportunity to get familiar with those. I mean, we're still we're getting as creative as we can exploring how we can introduce students that intersection that I talked about between research and professional practice. So I'll give you an example that I'm going to use on my educational psychology module. So in that module, students we introduced to some case study material. So what I mean by that is actual assessment information, which would be the same sort of data, the same sort of information that you would use if you were an educational psychologist. Okay? So it could be all sorts of stuff. So it starts off with just basic information, the actual the consultation request form. It's an official one from when I trained as an educational psychologist. So it's all kind of real life data and stuff. So it could be a consultation request form, and then there are some interviews and what have you, parents and teachers recorded, so you can start to kind of gather information from that. Then you might have some standardised assessment materials that were done on the child. You know, we're not able to facilitate students going in and doing this sort of assessment on the child, but you do the next best thing, which is actually kind of experiencing, exploring it. So it's all built up into kind of like a role play, where the students are asked to imagine that their educational psychologist had this information come in a little bit at a time. And then they take those professional frameworks I mentioned earlier, and they apply those to try and get a conceptualisation and understanding of what is going on for this case study child, and then eventually to make some targets for interventional and suggest some strategies to support that child. So, yeah, I mean, I think I'm really excited about how it's going to come together in terms of that real employability factor.

Emily Slade: Yeah. Speaking of employability, what options are there for your students?

Dr Dave Smalley: There is, there's quite a few different options. So the major areas that are covered cover mental health and children and physical health as well, really education, social services, kind of the social environment of the child. That means working with the family as well, kind of supporting home practices, things like that. What the course effectively does is because you are learning about lots and lots of different elements, important elements of psychology that or the other areas that influence a child's well being and upbringing, because you are learning about it holistically. So you're learning about all the different things together, you're kind of developing a much broader oversight in terms of how psychology improves outcomes for children, which is something that you would use in any Applied Psychology profession. So we're not just focused on education, we're not just focused on mental health. You could, you could go down all of those, those different, different realms. So it kind of gives you that basis to apply for jobs or for further training. So you could decide, I want to become an educational psychologist. If you want to do that in England, you then need to go and get professional doctorate in child and educational psychology. Afterwards, we've set this course up so things like assessment briefs provide experience and evidence that you are able to get yourself onto that training course. You could also go straight from it to be an educational mental health care practitioner. I think there's a kind of a NHS Masters that you can apply for that you would have the relevant experience. In the back of that, or again, working in industry, working in business. There's lots of, lots of applications.

Emily Slade: Fantastic, brilliant. Let's focus on the university itself, now. What's it like to study an MSc at the University of Sussex?

Dr Dave Smalley: I could tell you about the school of psychology?

Emily Slade: Yeah, absolutely.

Dr Dave Smalley: So I think I've already mentioned that we're very large school. We have huge diversity in research expertise, so you get the benefits of that, but it would be easy to assume that the flip side of that is that you get lost in a very large community of people, right? But actually, our postgraduate programs, they're sufficiently big that there's a lot of diversity. You get to meet a lot of different students from a lot of different countries, but they're also sufficiently small to ensure that students are able to form connections with one another as well. So you really get to know your fellow students well. Typically, you know, a lot of our students will form meaningful relationships, both for study and often socially as well, with their fellow postgraduate students. And our teaching approach, certainly for this course and for most courses, I think most of our postgraduate courses, it's heavily workshop based. So that means that you're doing a lot of work interacting with other people, hearing about their experiences, reflecting on your experiences and sharing those you know, that's a really strong student experience, enhancing feature of the course. I think so. So there's, there's that element studying psychology with us. As I've said, you can also expect to be part of a vibrant multinational cohort. I can tell you that we've had applicants from over 30 countries on the course, strong representation from India in particular, but you know, really across the board, loads and loads and loads of different countries, which is fantastic, because, you know, if you think about what we're doing, we're thinking about how to apply psychology to improve outcomes for children. It's only going to be enriched by hearing about how it's done in other cultures and understanding how different countries have different perspectives on mental health, or whatever it might be. So yeah, that's really exciting. I think the opportunity to kind of connect with different people. And, you know, everyone is very welcome and, well, it's an enriching experience. Just to hear about the diversity of experiences that others have had. It also provides a basis from which to question our own assumptions, right? So we might have a way that we deal with education in the UK, a classic example is we love to assess people in the UK, if you look at our school system, it's like really important exams every year, and if you fail your exams, you're a useless individual. And you know, there's no point in even thinking about trying to exist the rest of your life. So maybe that's not the most effective way of doing it. You know, we just look over at Scandinavia and, you know, no assessment models to education and you know, and they seem to be a bit more successful in what we're doing. And you know that that sense of disclosure, being able to listen to different people's opinions, people, being able to share it without feeling challenged, that also kind of that, that disclosure element, it develops a bit of intimacy. And again, you know, what we often see is that just a process of sharing those reflections really enable students to get a lot of self worth out of doing that. And you know, that's a real kind of focus of the course, and it's a real focus of the school of psychology as well. But perhaps our key kind of theme as a school is that we place kindness at its core value. So yes, you talked about research accidents, and Sussex is renowned for that, and blah, blah, blah, yeah, yeah. You know, that's all important. But even more important than that, we believe, is having a culture of kindness within the school. So well, what does that actually mean? It means that, you know, we encourage people to seek out opportunities to be supportive of one another. Someone doesn't know where the library is, don't just kind of point them in a direction, take them, take them half the way there something like that. It's very easy for for people to do. It means we believe that students and faculty work best on the same level. So we don't want to be kind of like head in the sky academics. Actually, we're all here supporting each other, embarking on the same learning journey together. And professional services, of course, are part of that equation as well. Student Experience teams, things like that, and what that hopefully creates is a sense where there's an expectation for people to support one another, a sense of harassment and prejudice is just not tolerated, and a sense where students feel they actually have some influence on autonomy over their studies. And we know from psychology research that's really powerful in motivating the student to continue to learn. And we strongly believe that if you've got that built in as your foundation, the student will perform at their best. You could have the most fantastic researcher at the pinnacle of their field, and that's fantastic, but the student needs to be in the right place to learn as well. And saying, We really try and promote that within the school, it's also interesting to know, and I think it would be short sighted me, not to mention where the university is based. So we're so lucky. We're a campus university based in a national park. Basically, you can walk from the library for two minutes up the hill, and you're in a national park, which is, you know, great if you need a little bit peace and quiet and what have you. But we're also, you know, five miles a seven minute train journey, and there's a train station just next to campus from Brighton, which is a very vibrant, cosmopolitan place, loads of music, loads of art, very multinational, often gets voted in the top few cities in the UK for happiness, especially in families and safety. I said there's something called the Brighton bungee. People go all right, I've studied now. I'm going to leave. I'm going to go and work in London. No, I'm not coming back to Brighton's. So yeah, it's definitely a, definitely a plus. But if, if more your thing is going into, like, a big city and a massive city like London, that's only 50 minutes away as well. So we've on the beach, of course. So so there's lots to like about lots to like about Brighton too, if that's that's something they're interested in.

Emily Slade: So just looping back to the idea of assessment and how other countries do things differently. What do you think? Do you think you should be assessing your students? Do you assess your students on this course

Dr Dave Smalley: Oh, gosh, that's it's a little bit of a mean question, because it makes me feel bad about saying yes, we do have assessments, but I think the assessments are part of learning. All right? So whether assessments should be just assessing someone to say, to make a judgment on their level of ability? For me, no, that's not right. And we actually work really hard at the university to encourage people to see their grades as a learning opportunity, right? You cannot learn if you don't fail, it's so it's an integral part of learning, right? So the assessment there is more an opportunity, hopefully, for learning. So the key question probably is, how do you make your assessment functional, useful and powerful for the students? So that's probably key. So yes, we do assess our students, but we one thing that we have is what we call an assessment brief. As a teaching team, we have collectively agreed that every single assessment comes with an assessment brief, and what that assessment brief does is it tells you the employability relevance, the relevance of that assessment, and why doing that assessment is going to enhance your knowledge, to show how you've got learning objectives, yes, but also to be able to increase your opportunity for for getting employed. And the plan is also to have taglines which you can cut and paste into your CV. So after you've done this assessment, you can say this about yourself, which, yeah, which I think could be really, really powerful. It makes the assessments worthwhile. It makes them feel relevant to students, hopefully, and also enhances employability at the same time. You know, it keeps us in line to make sure our assessments are worthwhile for students as well, I think so. That's critical.

Emily Slade: That's wonderful. Thank you. So what advice do you have for anyone looking to work in child psychology?

Dr Dave Smalley: My top tip would be ever aware of how you can use your understanding of psychology theory and research to improve outcomes for children and young people. Okay, you need to develop that understanding. Then you need to apply it. Don't just do things on a hunch because it's because it's what someone else told you to do. Try and understand why you're doing it based on relevant theory research, the relevant literature behind it? Okay, it's why the course is set up in the way it is. You know, for one, you know, outlining relevant theory and research to students before engaging them in the intersection between that and professional practice. But when you come to apply for psychologists careers, and when you're practicing as a psychologist, that will be absolutely fundamental to your success. And so that would be my, my top tip. I have some others?

Emily Slade: Yeah!

Dr Dave Smalley: Yeah. So I would seek opportunities to work with children as early as you can. The reason is, you know, a it's good to get some experience and what have you. But the other element is working with vulnerable people, especially children, especially individuals with mental health, especially with, you know, potentially fractious families, difficult families, that takes its toll on your emotional reserves. You may not realise it, but when you're there all day, every day, you know, you start to get a real feel about that impact that it has on your well being. It means that working with children and vulnerable people, you know, it's not for everyone. Some people can't go to bed and just clear that out of their head. So get that experience, get a sense of how you feel when you're working with children. For some people, it was like, This is my calling. This is so important, I am 100% motivated to do it. But other people actually kind of teeter a little bit at that point. So a big tip is to get take opportunities to do that, and you don't necessarily need to give up if it's not working. You just need to learn that you need to work on your own resilience, you know, your own emotional strength, and actually that that is super important. It's not just a wishy washy thing, and you just need to have a bigger backbone. No, it takes time. You know you need to adapt to need to work, through it, but you need to learn that about yourself right before you can before you can go on. Finally, when it comes to getting relevant, longer term paid experience, which would be required for some careers, don't just take the first job you're offered. Be clear in your interview that your strengths include your understanding of psychology theory and research, and you want opportunities to embed this understanding into your practice. You don't just want to end up as a teaching assistant who is attached to one child just giving them worksheets, right? That's not going to get you the experience that you need. So kind of be selected. Active and be assertive in the workplace as well. About look, I've got these things to contribute. You need to find a way to help me to contribute those.

Emily Slade: That's brilliant. That's fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today.

Dr Dave Smalley: Oh, you're very welcome, Emily. It's definitely been my pleasure.

Emily Slade: Thanks again to Dr Dave for his time. For more information on the course you can head to prospects.ac.uk. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. You can find all episodes on YouTube @futureyoupod so make sure to check out the channel for full length videos of each episode. Otherwise, thank you, as always for listening and good luck on your journey to future you.

Notes on transcript

This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.

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