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Educational psychology in Ireland andits Psychological Society of Irelanddivision – a historyDesmond Swana

a Emeritus Professor of Education, University College Dublin,Dublin, IrelandPublished online: 12 May 2014.

To cite this article: Desmond Swan (2014) Educational psychology in Ireland and its PsychologicalSociety of Ireland division – a history, The Irish Journal of Psychology, 35:1, 25-32, DOI:10.1080/03033910.2014.905220

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Educational psychology in Ireland and its Psychological Society ofIreland division – a history

Desmond Swan*

Emeritus Professor of Education, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

(Received 9 June 2013; accepted 13 March 2014)

This article considers the context in which the Division of Educational Psychology(DEP) of the Psychological Society of Ireland (PSI) and the profession of educationalpsychologist emerged in Ireland. Education itself provided the stimulus and locus formany important events in the history of psychology as a science and profession, andeach discipline owes much to the other. Educational issues concerned PSI from thevery beginning, and a committee or special interest group emerged in the 1970s. Thearticle outlines three discourses that led to the growth of special needs education inIreland in the latter half of the twentieth century, and these, influenced strongly bydevelopments in other countries and by litigation against the state, led to radicalchange in government policy-making here. Ground-breaking legislation embodying achanged notion of what school education is, and marking a new relationship betweenthe school and the individual pupil followed. Educational psychologists would becentral to the emergence and realisation of these developments, and in increasingnumbers. The first professional training course for educational psychologists in anIrish university was set up in 1995. In response to 30 years of campaigning by PSI inparticular, the long-sought National Educational Psychological Service (NEPS) wasfinally set up in 1999. This article outlines the major achievements of the SpecialInterest Group/DEP, including its influence on PSI policies in education, itscontribution to the emergence of NEPS and its impact on national policy and onlegislation itself. Its many continuing professional development activities are specifiedwhile developments of national importance in psycho-educational research are alsoindicated.

Keywords: psychology; educational; Ireland; profession

Contexts

The establishment of the Diploma in Psychology at University College Dublin (UCD) in1958 (partly funded by the Irish National Teachers Organisation), the announcement bythe then Minister for Education Dr Patrick Hillery in 1965 that mental handicap might bean educational as well as a health problem, the setting up of the City of Dublin VocationalEducation Committee’s (VEC) Psychological Service in 1960 and the appointment ofthree psychologists to the then Department of Education (DE) in 1965 – these were fourimportant events in the gestation of educational psychology as a profession in this state.

At the time, the psychologists appointed to the Department of Education and Skills(DES) had no remit to work in primary schools, as the department’s service was orientedtowards working with guidance and remedial teachers, and at post-primary level only.

*Email: desmaryswan@gmail.com

The Irish Journal of Psychology, 2014Vol. 35, No. 1, 25–32, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03033910.2014.905220

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However, further progress here was slow and it was not until 1999/2000 that acountrywide school-based psychological service [National Educational PsychologicalService (NEPS)] was finally set up. NEPS was established during the ministry of MichealMartin to work in both primary and secondary schools. By 1995 the first professionaltraining programme in a university (MA in Educational Psychology) had been establishedby the author, not in a psychology department, but in the Education Department of UCD.The course had institutional support from the Psychological Society of Ireland (PSI), andenjoyed excellent cooperation from the employing bodies, especially NEPS, the City ofDublin VEC and the County Dublin VEC, which had been set up in 1992, with JamesConnolly as director. Within PSI, the Division of Educational Psychology (DEP) wasestablished in 2005 as successor to the Special Interest Group in Educational Psychology(SIG-EP), three of whose members, Paid McGee, Torlach O’Connor and Tony Gorman,had served as presidents of PSI.

This paper is based on over 40 years of professional and academic work in the area,on observation, experience and reflection, as well as discussion with colleagues, andunbroken membership of both the PSI and the committee of DEP since they wereestablished.

Historical developments

History records that the earliest attempt to systematically apply psychology to schoolingin Ireland, and perhaps in Britain, was that of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (father of Maria,the novelist) in their school at Edgeworthstown in 1797, influenced by the psychologicalthinking of Jean Jacques Rousseau (Curtis & Boultwood, 1970). However, a furthercentury would elapse before modern scientific psychology would emerge from aconvergence of education with philosophy, medicine, empirical science and statistics,leading to the birth of our discipline. A significant impetus to the growth of modernpsychology itself came, as every psychology undergraduate knows, from Alfred Binet’sdevelopment of his pioneering test, which itself was developed in response to a requestfor help from the Paris education authorities in 1904. Also influential was the challenge tosolve the problems of educating exceptional children in many other contexts, illustratingthe interdependence of scientific research and professional practice (Swan, 2004).Nevertheless the heavy indebtedness of psychology in general to education, and indeedthe reverse – including the major contribution of Maria Montessori to both (Swan, 1989a,1997b) – is a fact often overlooked, even by historians of psychology. It could also besaid that there was a regrettable tendency, at least among early generations ofpsychologists, to assume that psychology could be applied to education almost ‘asthough education had no territory of its own’ (Kallos & Lundgren, 1975). Indeed teachertraining programmes in Ireland, notably those in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) andCarysfort College, had included units on psychology since the 1920s. However, theauthor would suggest that the teamwork approach of today, based on mutual professionalrespect between teachers, educational, clinical and counselling psychologists and medicaland paramedical professionals, shows that unhelpful attitudes of the past are finally beingsuperseded.

Since the work of Froebel, Seguin and Montessori, educational psychology hascontributed immeasurably, though not exclusively, to the vast improvement in interper-sonal relationships between teacher and pupil, and school and home that more recentdecades have witnessed. Professor O’Doherty of UCD was courageously critical ofaspects of the compulsory Irish language policy of the state in the 1960s, a stance that

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seemed vindicated by the empirical research findings of Dr John Macnamara(Macnamara, 1966). This over-heated controversy, while it was eventually effective inmodifying state policy, probably marks the first time that modern empirical psychologycame to public prominence in Ireland.

A particular contribution to the teaching of Irish, the Buntus Cainte programme, wasdevised in the 1960s based strictly on behavourist psychology – rather than on provenpedagogical principles – and received official state support (O’Domhnallain, 1968).Though hailed as a breakthrough in its time, it eventually proved a failure, an illustrationperhaps of psychologists knowing better than the teachers on pedagogy, withoutconsulting them. A more enduring contribution of behavourist psychology to education,however, if in a very specific area, is Applied Behaviour Analysis training for pupils onthe autistic spectrum.

The highly centralised school system in Ireland was still very resistant to change untilthe 1960s, and initiatives from the authorities, when they did come, were more likely tohave been responding to developments or demands ‘from below’ rather than initiated‘from above’. Teacher training for special needs education was one instance of this; thefirst Irish training courses for learning support (then called remedial) and specialeducation teachers were in fact established by psychologists working in education at theSt John of God Clinic in Rathgar, the Education Department at UCD, St Patrick’sCollege of Education and the Cork Polio and General Aftercare Association (later theCope Foundation) in Cork. The fact that the City of Dublin VEC’s Psychological Servicewas set up five years before the DE itself employed its first psychologists was anotherinstance of leadership ‘from below’, the time-lag possibly suggesting negative attitudes toour emerging discipline among the authorities here.

Educational psychologists and special needs education

The remit of the professional psychologist in education, whether self-employed oremployed by the DE, NEPS, City of Dublin VEC, the County Dublin VEC, the HealthService Executive or elsewhere, is by no means confined to the area of specialeducational needs; for instance, pupil guidance and counselling were introduced to ourschools as a result of Professor O’Doherty setting up the Diploma in Careers Guidance inUCD’s psychology department in 1968 (Chamberlain, 1985). Nevertheless, the develop-ment of educational psychology as a profession and later, of the PSI Division, wasintimately associated with the special educational needs area and had been since theopening of the first Child Guidance Clinic by Dr John McKenna, Ireland’s firstprofessional psychologist. The 1960s also saw the emergence of the first of threesuccessive eras and discourses concerning the education of exceptional pupils, withpsychologists and psychology central to learning from them, as also happened in othercountries, for example the USA (Borich & Tombari, 1995).

The pupil failure discourse, replacing the silence, blame and neglect of earliergenerations – evident also in mental health services in the past – led to the twin strategiesof special schools and ‘remedial teachers’ as the solutions to the problem of pupils’ failureto master the regular curriculum, whose causes were presumed to lie within the individual.Indeed, psychologists’ reports, often interpreted too rigidly – even by psychologiststhemselves – would now be used to separate out ‘the remedials’ (i.e., those pupils showingan achievement deficit) and ‘the specials’ (those identified as needing special education) assuch pupils were soon labelled, from the rest of the population. In this context reification,especially of IQ test scores, was rampant. Next came the school failure discourse, the

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belief that pupil failure was largely the fault of the school. This added the special class as afurther strategy, with integration (mainly locational) as a supposed aim. However,considerable resistance soon ensued from those parents who refused to send their childrento special schools though recommended to do so by psychologists (O’Connor, 1983).Following the publication in 1993 of the Report of the Special Education ReviewCommittee (three of whose members were educational psychologists), as well assuccessful litigation by parents against the state – the O’Donoghue and Sinnott cases inparticular – the third discourse, that of inclusion, gained momentum.

The inclusion or mainstreaming movement, powered by such litigation, ledgovernment eventually to change its notion of school education itself, by now espousinga policy of inclusiveness (Swan, 2001). The main outcome of this third discourse wasradically new, indeed revolutionary, legislation, which would base schooling no longer onavailability but on entitlement; the notion of pupils’ rights was now entering educationalpolicy-making. The Education Act (1998), followed by the Education for Persons withSpecial Educational Needs (EPSEN) Act (2004), guaranteed the right of every person toan education appropriate to their needs and abilities, and where possible, in an inclusiveenvironment. However, the fact that, at the time of writing, this legislation still awaits fullimplementation does not negate its immense significance as a new departure in Irisheducation policy (see Swan, 2006).

Just as psychology was the source of some of the basic concepts, controversies, andexpectations in the second and third of these discourses, it became clear that substantiallyincreased numbers of educational psychologists, working closely with teachers, wouldnow be required in schools in order to make this new policy a reality. Initially, the onlysource of supply of such personnel would be the PSI’s own Diploma in ProfessionalPsychology (Educational), which ran from 1991 to 2006. The decision to discontinue itwas seen by some as regrettable, and as doing a disservice to PSI members and theirfuture clients, particularly as the universities were not in a position to meet the trainingneeds in this area.

Of course the more recent policy of teachers assessing their pupils for high-incidencelearning difficulties partly, but only partly, may reduce the demand for qualified educationalpsychologists as assessors. However, the continuing absence of student subvention forthose in educational psychology training programmes (in contrast to the arrangement fortrainee clinical psychologists in Ireland) places a considerable, and often prohibitive,financial burden on otherwise excellent aspiring educational psychologists in Ireland. Thereare also some who train in Queen’s University Belfast or other UK universities, where athree-year doctorate is now the norm, and with individual student funding available there,though subject to certain conditions. A number of such graduates subsequently return totake up employment in Ireland. Nevertheless, in the interest of equity across the professionand of seeking national self-sufficiency in the supply of educational psychologists trainedfor the Irish context, PSI should adopt a system-wide perspective and press for a nationalpolicy of subventing graduates undertaking such training here. Such an initiative woulddemonstrate the society’s sense of responsibility to all of its members, and its achievementwould certainly serve to underpin the future of the two training courses that now exist here,those in UCD and in Mary Immaculate College Limerick.

Establishment of the Division of Educational Psychology

Turning to educational psychology within PSI, DEP was set up in 2005, building on thegroundwork done by Michael Cullinane, William Kinsella and others in the SIG-EP. The

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members of DEP’s first committee were: Kathleen Kelleher, Kieran Sweeney, Niamh NiAogain (Secretary), Maureen Costello (now Director of NEPS), Aisling Whelan, PatriciaTimoney (Treasurer) and Desmond Swan (Chair). Since then the division has benefitedfrom the strong support of many willing colleagues, whether as officers or as ordinarymembers, especially those who have also served as Chair: Maureen Costello, FlanGeaney (for two years), Kieran Sweeney, Deborah Walsh and Colm O’Connor (also fortwo years). By 2010, its membership had grown very rapidly to 160 although there wouldremain other colleagues who chose not to join.

Clearly the establishment of our division met a long-felt need among psychologistsworking in schools to have their own professional forum, to set out professional standardsin their area, to have a common professional voice, to make common cause withcolleagues in PSI and to be able to make their contribution to shaping and implementingrelevant PSI and national policies especially in the new era of inclusive education.Already members of the SIG-EP had expressed concern on behalf of PSI to DE officialswhen, following legislation in the USA, Sweden and the UK, the EPSEN Act (2004) wasbeing drafted, and this led to improvement in the wording of the Act here. Later thedivision was able to advise PSI Council as to how the society might respondappropriately to other national developments in education. These included the Schemefor Commissioning Personal Assessments, as well as negotiating successfully with theNational Council for Special Education in 2008, under Mitchel Fleming as PSI President.

A particular achievement of the SIG-EP, building on the earlier workgroups oneducation on which Paid McGee, Paul Andrews and Brendan Broderick were particularlyprominent, was its tireless work towards the establishment of NEPS. The setting up of aPilot Project in two localities was a significant success, which occurred after prolongedpublic campaigning and lobbying of successive Ministers for Education, even againstentrenched opposition from the DE inspectorate (expressed in person to this writer) over30 years. This would lead on, after some years to the establishment of NEPS itself, withPSI members Ann Halliday and Dympna Walsh playing a crucial negotiating role (seealso Swan, 1981). PSI’s policy document of 1973, A Psychological Service to IrishSchools, was updated in 2000 and outlined the society’s revised blueprint for such aservice.

Members of the SIG-EP also helped to ensure that PSI itself was named in theEPSEN Act (2004), a great honour but also a great responsibility for our members and forthe society. An educational psychologist’s report of assessment may now be required inorder to obtain additional resource teaching hours for a pupil in school, who has a low-incidence disabling condition, or in order to avail of reduced entry points for university.In addition, a report from a registered psychologist may be necessary in order to obtainincome tax relief for educational psychological expenses for a dependent child.

On the international stage (see Crowley, 2007), the division has long been affiliated toISPA (the worldwide International School Psychology Association based in the USA). In2010, the division advised PSI on the organisation of the largest conference oneducational psychology ever held in Ireland. This event was co-hosted by PSI withNEPS and the (renamed) DES along with the British Psychological Society’s NorthernIreland Branch (NIBPS) and the Northern Ireland Department of Education. Supportedand attended by the education ministers of both the northern and southern governments, itprovided a most impressive showcase for educational psychology in Ireland to veryappreciative colleagues from every continent, and to the Irish public. It also enabled Irishpsychologists to see beyond the English-speaking world, within which psychology here,like Western psychology in general, tends to be too firmly immured.

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In addition to these major events, the division holds regular continuing professionaldevelopment (CPD) events for its members and guests. It organises a symposium eachyear at the PSI Annual Conference and financially supports the presentation at theconference of sometimes ground-breaking research, particularly encouraging newlyqualified professionals in educational psychology to participate. The division seeks toorganise CPD in the widest possible variety of areas of policy and practice, underpinningthe current diversification of the psychologist’s role, towards less emphasis on individualassessment and more on consultation, systems and teamwork. A very successful jointconference was held with our NIBPS colleagues, while a further CPD opportunity formembers has been attendance at lectures delivered as part of the Ph.D. programme ineducational psychology at the UCD School of Education, arranged by the course director,Dr William Kinsella.

The division also contributes to the professional activity of PSI and has hadrepresentatives on PSI Council, the Membership Qualifications and RegistrationCommittee (MQRC), the Board of Professional Conduct and the successive psycho-metrics committees within PSI – whose longevity reflects the long-standing andwidespread ambivalence of the profession as a whole towards its own unique creation(or creator?), the standardised IQ test. It has also been represented on a psychometricscommittee convened by the DES for guidance counsellors, as well as on the Network ofEuropean Psychologists in the Educational Sector. At present, the division is negotiatingon behalf of PSI with the Disability Access Route to Education and the DisabilityOfficers’ Network on criteria for, and the facilitation of, disability-related access touniversities. It has provided specialist expertise to PSI Council on the accreditation of thetwo training courses that have been set up in our field, those at the UCD School ofEducation and at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, and advised the Council onengagement with bodies such as the Institute of Guidance Counsellors.

Social commitment, research and publication by educational psychologists

Psychologists have been at the forefront in helping schools to meet the immensechallenges of universal or mass secondary education, which the schools have undertakenover the past generation. The fact that much of our work appears to centre on thetechnicalities of whether and how pupils can access their legal educational entitlementsshould not obscure the profound difference that psychology, partly due to support by ourdivision, has made to enhancing the school experience of all pupils, and to the shift fromschooling as power to schooling as service (Swan, 1983, 1997a, 1997c).

Beyond the activities of the division, educational psychologists as members of theprofession have been appointed members of many government commissions, task forcessuch as the Task Force on Student Behaviour, chaired by Dr Maeve Martin (Martin,2006), and public bodies. Members of the profession have served on councils or advisorybodies of the National Council for Special Education, the National Council forCurriculum and Assessment, the Economic and Social Research Institute and of NEPSitself. Notable contributions have also been made to research and professionalorganisations including the Educational Research Centre at St Patrick’s College (foundedby an educational psychologist, Dr Thomas Kellaghan), the Anti-Bullying Centre at TCD(associated with Dr Mona O’Moore), the National Adult Literacy Agency, theEducational Studies Association of Ireland and the Reading Association of Ireland (thelatter three co-founded by the present writer), all of which owe their existence toeducational psychologists.

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Research by psychologists, the theoretical lifeblood of our work – while oftenseemingly disregarded by policy-makers unless it supports their preconceived positions –has played an important role in influencing official and professional thinking in education(e.g. Macnamara, 1966; Swan, 1978; Swan, 1989b; Swan, 1997a). This is also true of theTIMMS and PISA research carried out at the Educational Research Centre in St Patrick’sCollege, Dublin. Indeed, in view of the state’s unique venture into using the school as itschief means of restoring the Irish language (Coolahan, 1981), it may be that in the fieldsof bilingualism, language and literacy acquisition and intercultural education, theempirical research of Irish psychologists has contributed most to advancing theory ineducational psychology in the past four decades. One outstanding example is the world-renowned, pioneering work in bilingual education/second-language teaching, of Dr JamesCummins, a UCD graduate, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Thecontribution of research by educational psychologists at home can be found in journalssuch as the Irish Journal of Education, Language Culture and Curriculum, the IrishJournal of Psychology and Schola Europaea in particular.

While the role of the psychologist in school has, for some time now, been movingaway from its traditional exclusive focus on the individual, and both hopes and fears havebeen voiced at this development, there is no doubt that schools and school systems willcontinue to require the services of well-trained professionals, equipped with theknowledge and understanding to judge the educational implications of non-educational(paramedical and medical) as well as educational assessments (see Dessent, 1992).

The future

Much has been achieved by the first generation of psychologists in our field, reachingback to the early cohorts of Diploma in Psychology students in the 1960s beforeundergraduate degree courses existed. Many of that generation have long since movedinto senior management positions in their organisations, also migrating into neighbouringfields, whether in government, in academia, or in other sectors, bringing their psychologywith them. To our generation was given the rare honour of giving Ireland a completelynew professional specialism.

Notwithstanding this considerable volume of achievement, we can be confident thatcoming generations, while building on these foundations, will in turn devote their timeand talents to extend the boundaries of professional thought and work, research andpublication in our field in ways not yet dreamt of. It is also to be hoped that, aspsychologists, we may one day find the means to reach out more proactively over theinvisible, though nonetheless real, boundaries between our division and others withinPSI, and learn to think beyond some of the apparent distances between us.

NEPS is now an integral part of the DES, rather than an independent agency asoriginally envisaged, while many aspects of the governance of our profession itself are tobe handed over to the state regulation body CORU (Health and Social Care ProfessionalsRegistration Council). It seems that we shall need all the more to hold on to PSI and itsDEP, to go on providing an informed, independent, professional voice for psychologistsin education, to continue making public comment on relevant, emerging educationpolicies, legislation, etc., into the future. Maintaining the independent perspective, thepublic voice and esteem which our profession has acquired, will remain crucial in future,both to our discipline and for the discharge of our responsibility to those we serve, as theabove history has repeatedly demonstrated.

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