Trainee and qualified Educational Psychologists' experiences of using a culturally responsive consultation tool: an exploratory study

Growing cultural diversity within the United Kingdom has generated increasing demand for Culturally Responsive Practice (CRP) across professional contexts, including Educational Psychology (EP). EPs work with children and young people (CYP) and parents/carers from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. EPs are required to engage in CRP, yet the resources to support this in EP practice remain underdeveloped, and empirical research in this area is limited. This thesis presents an exploratory study which aimed to address this gap by exploring the experiences of trainee and qualified Educational Psychologists (T/EPs) using a culturally responsive consultation tool (CRCT). The CRCT is a digital interactive resource that was co-developed by me and a team of T/EPs to facilitate collaborative cultural exploration during consultation. A qualitative research design was employed, which reflects my role in developing the tool, but also the novel nature of using the tool as an intervention. The study is underpinned by a social constructivist epistemology and relativist ontology. Using a systems-psychodynamic lens, data were generated through focus groups with T/EPs at two time points. This was to capture the experiences of enacting CRP during participants’ typical consultation practice, and the experiences of enacting CRP with the CRCT. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. The findings identified that TEPs were more likely to use the CRCT than EPs, suggesting that the training period represents an optimal window for embedding new tools into practice. The findings also identified that psychological and systemic barriers to CRP implementation were experienced by both groups, regardless of experience level. These findings informed a revised CRCT and the 4R framework to understand the CRP barriers within consultation. Aligning with its exploratory design, this research raises important questions about how culturally responsive consultation tools might be further developed, embedded, and evaluated within EP practice.