Future Directions in School Psychology in Australia

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of some of the key themes presented in the Handbook of Australian School Psychology: Integrating International Research, Practice and Policy, and suggests a number of key recommendations for the Australian education and psychology professions to improve primary and secondary students’ behaviour, learning and mental health and wellbeing outcomes. Recommendations include:

• • Increasing the visibility of the Australian school psychological profession within the education system

• • Removing the requirement for school psychologists to have a teaching qualification

• • Designing school psychology-specific postgraduate training programmes for entry into the school psychology profession

• • Employing the term ‘school psychologist’ throughout Australia

• • Advocating for the necessity of school psychologists in schools

• • Fulfilling the minimum requirement of one full-time school psychologist to 500 students

• • Forming a working party to collaborate and draw on best-practice evidence to create national guidelines for the assessment of intellectual disabilities and specific learning disorders and to develop national guidelines on the use of evidence-based measures to evaluate improvements in student behaviour, learning; and mental health and wellbeing.

• • School psychologists playing an active and key role in Australian schools’ application of UNESCO’s four pillars of education in schools, particularly in relation to the third pillar, ‘learning to live together’.