“I've never been in a job where you've had to work so hard to work out where you fit” A multi-perspectival IPA exploration of Educational Psychologists’ professional identities when working in or alongside CAMHS.

Multi-agency collaborations between Educational Psychologists (EPs) and Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) are sought within national legislations around supporting mental health for children and young people. Unclarity around professional roles and identities was recognised as a barrier to this way of practising. Professional identity is identified as a highly individual construct, continuously developing based on personal and professional factors. Whilst the role of the EP is broadly recognised as unclear and difficult to identify, research around how EPs and CAMHS can collaborate is also scarce. This study seeks to address this gap in research by exploring EPs’ experiences of professional identities when working in or alongside CAMHS. A multiperspectival interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is employed to explore how six EPs experience and make sense of their professional identities. Two directly related groups are purposively sampled for this study. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with N= 3 EPs working in an Outer London Local Authority, and N= 3 EPs working in a CAMHS team to explore how they experience their professional identities. A phenomenological, interpretative, and idiographic stance is employed to analyse the interviews. Data emerging from the analysis suggest three broad themes (Boundaries, Making Sense of Role, and Individual Journey), which are described as either: a) a shared experience b) a reciprocal experience, or c) a path of meaning (experiences that are similar but lived in different ways). The findings are discussed in relation to current national educational psychology practices, effective collaborations with CAMHS, and future directions for the profession. Limitations of the research and the researcher’s position within this study are also appraised.