As individuals, we are shaped by material conditions and social forces. Things like our access to public resources such as the NHS, our ability to accrue money through our work.
How resources are distributed across society, our social norms and the institutions that uphold them like the school, media and political system – all of these factors help to produce our sense of self and create both possibilities and barriers for how we are able to act in the world.
The time they are a-changin’: consultation within its historical context
Yet, we don’t just passively absorb the social context we are born into; we are active participants pushing back on societal constraints. We go out into the world and shape it. In our work, our activism, our social interactions, conflicts between groups and so on, we change the material conditions and social forces we are born into leading to new possible ways of being, in an endless cycle of change. This Marxist theory of history (known as historical materialism) will be the central analytic lens I use to critique consultation within educational psychology practice.
The rigid hierarchies, racism of empire and the aristocratic fear of the working class constituted the social setting in which our profession’s founder Cyril Burt argued in favour of eugenics and an innate superiority in the intellect of children from wealthy backgrounds. The radicalism of the 1970s led educational psychologists of the time to reject the practice of their predecessors and break free of child guidance clinics, publishing the influential text ‘Reconstructing Educational Psychology’ in 1978.
Most recently, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a new way of doing things – the consultation model – emerged. Patsy Wagner, its key proponent at the time, describes the model as:
“a voluntary, collaborative, non-supervisory approach, established to aid the functioning of a system and its inter-related systems…it involves a process in which concerns are raised, and a collaborative and recursive process is initiated that combines joint exploration, assessment, intervention and review…it de-emphasises positional authority and gate-keeping within the LEA”
Wagner, 2016
The basic idea, as far as I’ve ever understood and practiced it, is that consultation aims to bring together key stakeholders in a situation to both identify a shared problem and come up with a shared goal. The psychologist, within this situation, renounces their role as an expert who assesses a child and then tells the school what to do to meet that child’s needs. Instead, the EP acts as a facilitator, to work alongside others, amplifying marginalised voices in order to develop a coherent narrative of change throughout the process of the consultation meeting and the future review meetings that occur.
It is hoped that, from this narrative of change, those embedded in the school system will be able to make material change within it, with ongoing consultative support from the EP. When I say ‘material change’ I mean a change in the way the system is ordered, as opposed to discursive, mental or perceptual change, which focus on change at the level of how we might talk, think or feel about something. An example of this might be replacing the isolation room with a classroom-based trauma informed approach, or providing free transport to school.
Consultation is founded on 4 key theoretical frameworks (Wagner, 2000);
- social constructionism
- symbolic interactionism
- personal construct psychology
- systems theory.
Symbolic interactionism focuses on how the meanings we develop in relation to ourselves and those around us are shaped and maintained through our social interactions.
Social constructionism is central to consultation’s theory of change as it centralises language as a tool that helps us to construct meaning, both through our interactions with others and across society as a whole
As Wagner writes:
“We take seriously the idea that language creates reality, and seek to build a constructive discourse. We explore, in detail, what works and what things would be like if they were better. Through these detailed conversations the lives that people aspire to are more likely to eventuate”
Wagner, 2016
In short, language constructs the world and in order to construct it anew we need to use new discourses within social and professional contexts.
Here, the psychologist understands the consultative space as being constructed by the discourses used within it. Marginalised discourses (such as the subjective view of the child) may be gathered through personal construct psychology exercises so they can be amplified and explored to reframe dominant discourses. An example of this in action might be when, within a consultation, an educational psychologist aims to reframe the discourse of ‘naughty boy’ as ‘child with unmet need’.
Systems theory is introduced to help understand the child within their context. Consultation work is often ‘indirect’ work where the psychologist works with stakeholders in the child’s system, particularly teachers and other education workers “based on the efficiency, impact and prevention aspects of the intervention” (Wagner, 2016). The thought being that, if we can bring together multiple stakeholders from different agencies and support them to improve their practice and collaborative working, they will be able to apply their new knowledge to the wider system and thus improve the lives of multiple children or address problems before they’ve even presented themselves.
From what I understand, consultation was an attempt by Wagner to move away from the male-dominated hierarchical and individualising forms of expert-assessment psychology that were typical within 90s educational psychology services. For what it’s worth, I think the move towards consultation brought with it a notable improvement in practice. I also admire the tenacity with which Wagner and her colleagues challenged the status quo and brought about a truly dramatic change in our practice.
Nevertheless, consultation, like any other paradigm shift in practice, also emerges out of changing material conditions and social forces. These were economic boom years, where influential and well-funded local authorities worked in collaboration with LA-maintained schools. Liberalism and its core philosophical tenets were the only game in town. Big questions about how society and its apparatuses should run became reduced to discussions around the effective management of liberal institutions. This condition was famously described by social theorist Francis Fukuyama (1992) as the ‘end of history’.
Voices of dissent were weak enough to be ignored. People suffered but not in large enough numbers to be recognised. The dominant feeling might be understood by the idea that, whilst we might have differences of opinion relating to tactics, we were all on the same team and everything was going great. The motivating question under these circumstances becomes one central to the logic of consultation: ‘how do we effectively manage our team dynamic so the system works efficiently?’
Within the context of late 90s/early 2000s social life, this question makes a lot of sense. As does the overt focus on language. When we are all broadly on the same team and power is more equally distributed, maybe all we need is a change in discourse to improve the functioning of a system. I have no doubt that consultation within such a social framework, that functioned well enough for just enough people, produced many successful pieces of work. However, those material conditions are long gone. Despite this, there is seemingly no paradigm shift on the horizon within educational psychology. Indeed, in quite the opposite fashion, consultation has become somewhat of a ‘sacred cow’, uncritically presented as a force for good. Yet, does consultation hold up, in both theory and practice, within the context of 2025?
The past is a foreign country: consultation in the current context
The 2008 financial crisis is understood by many on the political left as the start of the end for neoliberalism – the still dominant ideology of individualism fuelled by the destruction of the public sector in favour of a globalised private sector, which emerged from the governments of Thatcher and Reagan.
Our economies are no longer growing like they used to and have never recovered from the massive amounts of public money that were doled out to rescue the banks from their own mismanagement almost 20 years ago. This, combined with continuing unwillingness to properly tax the rich and redistribute wealth in other ways, and both ecological and political breakdown making everything *really expensive*, has led to the normalisation of debt-based precarious living for the vast majority.
The working classes have been fractured both ideologically (grind culture and self-improvement taking the place of union and collective action) and materially (the lack of common employment and community spaces). Add to this decades of racist, prejudicial and exclusionary policy and rhetoric from politicians, fuelled by media support, and you end up with an alienated and divided society at large. Take one look at the news and you’d be hard pressed to find support for the idea that we’re all on the same team nowadays.
How has this manifested in education? Private-sector frameworks have been introduced to both the school via academization and the local authority via things like trading and outsourcing, centralising the need to make profit as more important than the quality of the service provided. LA funding that was previously used to provide services to schools now goes directly to academies, who are free to spend it how they choose. Academies are no longer beholden to the LA and instead their loyalties lie with the wider multi-academy trust (MAT). Their interests are driven by the data priorities of Ofsted and ‘bums on seats’, so that they can run as profitable businesses. Thus, a budget-cut local authority neither has the finances nor the authority to discharge the responsibilities with which it has been tasked by the government.
Within EP services, the 1990s drive towards “efficiency” that Wagner identified as a reason to move towards consultation, has sprouted into a full-blown obsession. Every hour is accounted for in the working day as part of our work-allocation models. Some services and workplaces (including ones I have directly worked for) openly admit that staff are being allocated more hours of work than they are being contracted for (giving 110% is no longer a metaphorical capitalist ideal, more a blunt reality and expectation). Under these conditions, EPs are spread so thinly they often conclude their involvement after a single school visit. Consultation goes from being an ongoing process where EPs support a school to make change over time, to a single hour-long meeting – never to be repeated. How can progressive change occur when such little time is dedicated to it?
Consultation in the end-times: practicing consultation in a broken system
The key argument I want to propose here is that whilst consultation may have been able to produce lasting change (I will unpack what I mean by change shortly) in the liberal ‘halcyon days’ of Blairism, it is significantly less likely to result in change within our current fractious and increasingly authoritarian world.
A focus on discursive change within consultation does have its uses, and aspects of this sort of process are used in the Marxist tradition during activities like consciousness raising circles. However, a problem presents itself when power is only ever understood in discursive terms (i.e. some discourses are more powerful than others and we need to challenge them with more liberatory discourses).
Unlike Consultation’s theoretical position, with its overt focus on the links between discourse and power, Marxism properly considers how non-discursive forms of power work to shape our subjective thought patterns, the discourses we are able to use and our ways of being in the world.
Where we sit in the social hierarchy, the quality of our housing, our conditions at work, the newspapers we read, our social network, the influence of the organisation we work for, our ability to access legal support. All of these are key factors that affect our ability to socially construct the world around us.
The key critique of social constructionism that Marxism offers is that an individual cannot freely use language to shape the world around them because social constructions and language are produced by our material conditions. As individuals, we might be able to use language to push in certain directions, but there are other social forces (wealth, power, the legal system and so on) that are far more powerful in their ability to shape our reality.
Put bluntly, a parent can try all they like to socially construct their child as an individual with needs that can’t be met, but if they don’t have access to legal representation they will find this much harder to achieve than if they do. Similarly, an EP may try to discursively reframe the statutory report they have to write as a needless paper-exercise. But if they don’t hand it in, they’ll lose their job and won’t be able to pay their rent. Thus the understanding of the statutory report remains fixed, and its construction is out of their hands. Discursive change rarely leads to material change if power is stacked against it.
Ultimately, consultation’s lack of a proper power-analysis is a massive problem for EPs in 2025. The power structures in education have changed massively over the last 25 years. Due to budget cuts and union restrictions, LA officers have little to no power within the current system, and neither do those who are actively involved in education such as teachers or teaching assistants. At the same time there has been a massive corporatised power grab by an ever more bloated senior leadership structure within academy trusts, alongside their ideological bedfellows such as ‘behaviour expert’ Tom Bennett. The educational psychologist, within all of this, is reduced from being a collaborative participant in the more equalised power structures of the 1990s to a door-to-door salesperson, trying to persuade the MAT that their wares are worth buying in 2025.
This has been happening gradually for decades and in all that time what have educational psychologists been saying? ‘We’re not the experts, we’re facilitators here to give psychology away within consultation’. We’ve been encouraged to abandon our own power-base and the vacuum that was left behind has been filled by profit-driven companies selling misrepresented and problematic understandings of behaviourism, neuroscience, and what Paolo Friere called the ‘bankers model of education’.
Thus, when we go into consultation with others, we are not entering a neutral space through which we can use psychology to grease the wheels of collaboration. Instead we are entering into a highly contested space of power and politics where the differences are irrevocable. The MAT CEO wants to permanently exclude Charlie because their core interests are in making their business profitable via a good Ofsted result, which is affected by grades over anything else. The EP wants to ensure that Charlie remains in an inclusive educational setting rather than stuck in an isolation booth all day because our interests are in child-wellbeing. There is both a conflict of interest and a set of power dynamics here that consultative practice at best sidelines but often just ignores completely. The MAT CEO holds all the cards, the EP holds none and in such a scenario we are unable to make the material change so vitally needed. Furthermore, consultation’s focus on changing discourses often distracts us from this fact, especially if we’ve had an impact on the discourses in the room. Regardless, we should be measuring our effectiveness based on what people do not what they say.
Yet consultation still chugs along as the most well-regarded practice in the EP’s tool-kit. How has it managed to stay so resilient for such a long time and in conditions hostile to its successful deployment?
Alongside the turn to consultation we see an associated ideological change in the way our work is evaluated, which actively works to prop up such practice. Effectiveness or impact of consultation, like many other aspects of EP involvement, is measured via perceived change, rather than any material change within the system. EPs are encouraged to focus on measuring ways in which their intervention has helped change how stakeholders think, speak and feel. ‘How has this consultation made you think differently about the situation?’, ‘Do you feel your voice has been heard during the consultation process?’, ‘Has EP involvement made you feel more positive about your situation?’
In a system that is set up to be actively hostile to the change that EPs want to see this kind of evaluation process becomes dangerous because it encourages stakeholders to mistake discursive, mental and perceptual changes (i.e. how they talk about, think about and feel about a situation) with material change (i.e. actual changes within the system).
What if everyone perceives the situation has improved because Charlie’s voice has been listened to and we have all started to speak about Charlie differently, but materially he’s still stuck in the same isolation booth for the same amount of time as before? What if the teacher has been provided with no extra time in the day to engage in relational conversations with Charlie? This is where consultation becomes problematic. If our involvement creates a situation where others perceive change and feel better, but remain stuck in the same shitty situation we were in before, such psychological practice amounts to a cruel magic trick encouraging individuals to tolerate the intolerable.
A paradigm shift – The EP as activist
None of this is to say consultation needs to be abandoned. It still represents a massive leap forward when compared to the previous dominant practice method of individual assessment. What I am advocating for is that consultation as a practice be properly critiqued and evaluated within the context of our current social system so we can be active participants in our own history, shaping consultation anew and. in doing so, making it fit for purpose in 2025 and beyond.
Educational psychologists must abandon the notion that we are ‘non-expert’ facilitators, and the downplaying of our own power bases and political agendas. Like it or not, the nature of our role within the school system makes us activists. The question is whether we want to use our role to be activists for progressive change or activists for the status quo. We need to ask ourselves, when does collaboration become complicity? What are our red-lines? How might we develop a key set of conceptions that we all bring to practice that we can advocate for within consultation (e.g. relational practice, an end to behaviourism, explorative pedagogies)? We need to be honest about the fact that we have an agenda, based in progressive political principles (I hope!), that we want to promote.
I think we need to engage with broader Marxist ideas relating to class-consciousness and collective interest. Recent events would suggest we are not all on the same team. In classical Marxist terms we are divided into a working class who have to make money via employment to survive, and a bourgeoisie who profit off the labour of the worker.
Developing a working class consciousness within our field would involve both recognising the common interests we have with children, families and other professionals (a need for safety, shelter, psychological belonging, meaningful actions) and how the contradicting interests of those who exploit us and prevent us from accessing such needs (an academy trust CEO on a 6-figure salary who wants to boost their school’s reputation).
How we do this is complex and multi-faceted. Within the consultation process it could begin by both calling out unethical practices and challenging the voices of the powerful so that the voices of the unheard can be amplified. But what’s really needed is collective action at a more political level. The history of progressive movements shows us that change isn’t made by individuals working in systems, in the manner that EPs do, but by large groups working together. Ultimately, we need to join forces with others to fight for systems and practices that allow for effective consultation; this approach cannot really work the other way round.
Finally, we need to incorporate the notion of material change into our evaluation processes. A material change might be small (an increase in how long Charlie stays in the classroom setting on a daily basis) or large (Charlie no longer being at risk of permanent exclusion), but without positive material change, we run the risk of confusing vibes with reality. In this light, consultation should be understood as an ongoing process by which we not only explore a problem situation, but we are also involved in the material and systemic change that the consultation identifies as needed. The real work begins when we start to collaboratively implement progressive and material change in our schools and communities alongside children, parents and teaching colleagues. A return to consultation as an ongoing collaborative and explorative process, rather than a one-off event, may be part of this, but it must not displace the need for action and material change with a ‘talking-shop’ where nothing actually gets done.
Ultimately, for me the suggestions I have outlined above would be part of a wider and long-overdue paradigm shift that moves towards an understanding of the EP as an activist fighting for systemic change to create a world in which positive psychologies can flourish.
References
Fukuyama, Francis (1992), The End of History and the Last Man.
Wagner, Patsy (2000), Consultation: developing a comprehensive approach to service delivery. Educational Psychology in Practice, Vol. 16 (1).
Wagner, Patsy (2016), Chapter 10: Consultation as a Framework for Practice in Frameworks for Practice in Educational Psychology: A Textbook for Trainees and Practitioners (Second Edition), Edited by Barbara Kelly, Lisa Marks Woolfson and James Boyle, Jessica Kingsley, London.
