In the past 20 years, the role of the educational psychologist who works in mental health has certainly increased. Last year, ASPEP undertook an audit of all 32 services in Scotland and we did event sampling for a week to look at how much time we spent on mental health. It came out that 29 per cent of our time was spent on mental health work, which ranged from direct work with young people and children to advice and so on.
Across Scotland, services will vary, depending on their size. It is a question of capacity—there are places with two psychologists and places with 40 psychologists. We are talking about economy of scale. At the most recent count, there were about 20 different interventions in mental health that educational psychology offers, including cognitive behavioural therapy, eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, and video interactive guidance.
We have developed a skill set, and we need to identify how we fit in with the tier model. It has taken a long time for educational psychologists to get their heads round the working of the tier model. We are now trying to target our interventions at a tiered level. We are focusing on tier 1 and tier 2, because that is where we know that the gap is. In fact, we are taking an even broader outlook; we are looking at tier zero, which is about promoting universal resilience. As educational psychologists, we are pretty good at that.
We target our interventions and focus on evidence-based interventions at tier 1 and tier 2. A prime example is safeTALK. My authority really pushes safeTALK, which is suicide awareness training. Every establishment has a member of staff who is safeTALK trained, and we are now rolling out safeTALK to S5 and S6 pupils. That is being done by educational psychology alongside health and social work services.
You mentioned autism spectrum disorder and asked how we work with CAMHS. The diagnosis would come either from the Scottish centre for autism or from the local CAMHS team, depending on the set-up, but that is just the diagnosis. That is fine as a medical diagnosis, but the issue is what to do with that diagnosis. We are working with CAMHS on what the implications of that are and what a child in that position needs help with. The child will have to go to school and be educated, so consideration needs to be given to his sensory issues. If he cannot cope with loud noises or with the dinner hall, we need to think about how we can we make environmental changes to his curriculum so that he can go to his local school. That is where the partnership working comes in.
The situation is improving, although there is further work to be done. Discussion is on-going in greater Glasgow and Clyde CAMHS, particularly in clinical psychology, about how we can formalise that in a better way so that we know exactly what we are doing.