iN 1978 Reconstructing Educational Psychology
was published, the same year that the first
author began his educational psychology
(EP) training at Exeter University under the
tutelage of Bob Burden and John Thacker.
The book was conceived and edited by Bill
Gillham, who at the time was tutor to the
Nottingham educational psychologist training
course, and he contributed a chapter
entitled ‘The Failure of Psychometrics’ in
which he asked the question ‘Why is it that
psychologists no longer find it so useful to
give individual, norm-referenced tests of
hypothetical constructs?’ Twenty-one years
later he recognised (Gillham, 1999) that
little had changed in the intervening years,
laying the blame clearly on the ‘administrative
and practice burden that followed on
from the 1981 Education Act’
Bob Burden also contributed a chapter
to the book entitled ‘Schools Systems
Analysis: A Project-Centred Approach’ in
which he described the approach of the
Exeter training course involving trainee EPs
in developing whole school interventions as
an alternative to the more limited ‘individual-child-crisis-type-referral-system’
which
was prevalent at the time, and became firmly
embedded in the system through the 1981
Education Act, reinforcing the role, disliked
by many EPs, as the gatekeeper of resources,
which was seen as undermining their professional
independence. He had himself been
involved in what was regarded as innovative
practice as an EP in West Sussex, where he
had worked with other forward thinking
psychologists such as John Acklaw and Ken
Bowen in developing in-service training
packages for serving teachers.