The programme team have long been committed to EDI in various aspects including via changes to the curriculum and selection procedures. Most recently, the provision of HEE funding has allowed the team to fund Research Assistants specifically for EDI. As they started in July 2021, Laura Simonds provides a 6 month reflection on decolonising clinical psychology below.
Ways of conceptualising distress and intervening within clinical psychology are dominated by theories and techniques that are Eurocentric and which come from a ‘White as the norm’ position. This has resulted in the marginalisation and silencing of other ways of understanding and working with people in distress and an evidence-base derived from narrowly defined samples. One way in which we define decolonising is to locate and include perspectives that have been marginalised theoretically and empirically.
Within psychology generally, and clinical psychology specifically, decolonising work is located within historic and ongoing evidence of disparities in health service access and coercive practices towards racialised and marginalised groups in society as well as more recent events such as the global Black Lives Matter protests. The work has been pump-primed by initial funding from Health Education England. We have developed several initiatives since beginning this work in March 2021. The first was to set up a working group, comprised of trainees, course staff, and external stakeholders, to advance curriculum EDI-related change. Early work also involved surveys of university and external lecturers to gauge their understanding of decolonising, the extent to which they have engaged with this, and the perceived gains and barriers A significant curriculum-focussed innovation was the development of a new, three-day, decolonising-focussed induction for our new first year trainees in September 2021
Whilst acknowledging our work is in its early phases and that we are learning all the time, we summarise some thoughts about starting the process of developing an inclusive curriculum. The first requirement in our view is an openness to questioning disciplinary knowledge and practice fully. This involves scrutinising the history and current context of the discipline to locate silenced/marginalised perspectives. This requires building partnerships with people who have been marginalised. We also think, as has been noted by others, that the burden for this work should be on people from groups who have traditionally held dominance and power in a discipline. However, this work is likely to be most meaningful when project working groups reflect a diversity of views and positions. We have also considered, through this work, how we signal value to trainees and how this gives us sites for change such as what comes first in the curriculum, what is assessed and how, and what is on our reading lists.
The new programme induction described above is a tangible way of underscoring our values and signalling their importance. Commitment at an organisational level is required to adequately resource decolonising work. If funding is not sufficient, any change is likely to lack depth, won’t be sustained, and may cause harm through seeming performative/tokenistic. At present, some key questions for us are: is it possible to create defined targets and, if this is not done, how can progress be defined and evaluated? And, sustainable and meaningful change is likely to require challenges to accrediting bodies (e.g. the BPS, the HCPC), funders, and commissioners. How will this be achieved?
