Service Development

The Educational Psychology Service (EPS) is committed to a process of continuous improvement. Each year the service produces an improvement plan to guide the work of the service and ensure activity is focused on making a difference to children and young people in Argyll and Bute. The plan is developed based on analysis of progress against previous plans, the views of parents, young people and our partners, analysis of data and evaluation of interventions. The EPS improvement plan links directly to wider Education and Authority planning, to deliver on key objectives.

To support continuous improvement, in November 2015 the EPS worked along with partners and a team from Education Scotland, through a process of Validated Self-Evaluation (VSE). The purpose of this partnership was to support, extend and challenge the service’s own self-evaluation thereby strengthening outcomes for learners and other stakeholders.

The VSE model aims to:

Build and support the capacity of EPS to evaluate their services and improve the quality of services they provide
Support EPS own self‑evaluation and quality systems;
Support, promote and develop good practice and best value in educational psychology;
Provide information to Scottish Ministers, the national Shared Risk Assessment process and the public on the quality of provision in EPS, and
Offer independent evaluation and validation of the processes of self-evaluation.

More detail on the VSE process can be found at Education Scotland.

The EPS and the Education Service very much welcomed the support and challenge offered by colleagues in Education Scotland through the VSE process and benefited greatly from the support of partners within Education and beyond to allow us to carefully consider the effectiveness of the service and what we need to do next to make a difference to children and young people in Argyll and Bute.

The following documents relating to service development can be found below:

Self-evaluation summary for VSE

VSE self-evaluation report
VSE exploration of theme
Improvement Planning
Service improvement plan 2015-16

Reporting

A+B EPS Validated Self-evaluation report
Service newsletters

The report on Argyll and Bute Psychological Service VSE, produced by Education Scotland, was published on the Education Scotland website on 15 January 2016.