The prevalence of domestic abuse in the UK and its impact on children and young people exposed to it suggests that it is likely to be encountered by educational psychologists (EP) in their work and that they could have a key role in supporting within educational settings. However, the subject has received sparse attention in the research literature of the profession. Whilst research exists more generally about professional responses to domestic abuse, there is little evidence of the use of psychosocial research methods. In order to address the gap in EP and psychosocial research around domestic abuse, this study explored from a psychosocial perspective how EPs encounter and respond to domestic abuse in their work. Four EPs were interviewed following the Free Association Narrative Interview method (Hollway & Jefferson, 2013). Thematic analysis was used to gather a picture of how EPs encounter domestic abuse in their work. The outcome of this analysis showed that for these participants, key elements of domestic abuse encounters were: Visibility (invisible/visible); Risk (danger/protection); Disturbance (disturbed/detached); Possibility (possible/impossible); and Learning (intellectual/experiential). Evidence of defence against unwanted thoughts and feelings in relation to domestic abuse work was then explored through individual analysis, paying attention to hesitations and avoidances in the interviews as well as the researcher’s own experience of interview encounters. This analysis, supported by psychosocial supervision, suggested that there were aspects of domestic abuse that appeared threatening to participants. These pertained to describing the abuse; situations of conflict; experiences of helplessness; negative evaluations; and feelings of shock, horror, and fear. The outcomes of this study suggest that domestic abuse is an emotive topic for EPs that is hard to process and requires further education and support to enable domestic abuse to be talked about and managed in a safe way when encountered in EP work.

Promoting the mental health and well-being of adolescents has increasingly become a priority for legislation in the UK. The Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) Code of Practice (DfE, 2015) highlights the increasing responsibility professionals have for supporting and promoting pupils’ social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs, a role which is especially pertinent for schools. However, there is a lack of current research exploring how school staff view promoting and supporting pupils’ emotional well-being. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken in one mainstream secondary school to gather the views of six school staff on their experiences and views of supporting pupils’ emotional well-being. The aim of the study was to explore and explain the contexts and mechanisms which facilitate or hinder how staff promote and support children and young people’s mental health and well-being. The data was analysed by use of a grounded theory methodology. The theory emerging from the data suggests that school staff believe that by having a structured, clear approach to supporting and promoting emotional well-being the school is able to become a safe space in an ever-demanding society. The overarching theory is labelled ‘providing containment – school as a safe place’. The findings are discussed in relation to existing literature and research. Implications for secondary schools and Educational Psychologists are discussed.

This psycho-social study explored the experiences of school staff who have worked with emotionally based school non-attendance. There is a paucity of qualitative accounts of school staff’s views in this area. Existing research focuses predominantly on the causes, risk and protective factors and the management of school non-attendance. Six participants took part in two interviews where psychoanalytically informed approaches were employed. This included the Grid Elaboration Method and Free Association Narrative Interviewing. The interview transcripts were analysed using Thematic Analysis, which illuminated five overarching themes: relationships between home and school; school factor s; conceptualisation and impact of school non - attendance; tasks and challenges of adolescence and individual journeys and emotions. The themes are discussed in relation to existing research and psychological theory. Consideration is given to the implications for the role of the Educational Psychologist in working with emotionally based school non-attendance. Strengths and limitations of the current study are discussed and ideas for future research are proposed.

There has been a huge increase in the number of Teaching Assistants (TAs) working in UK schools in recent decades, meaning that most teachers now share their classroom with at least one other adult. Despite this, there has been little systematic or structured research into such a key relationship in the education system. This thesis aims to address this by exploring teachers' and TAs' experiences of working together in primary schools. This is an exploratory piece of research which was conducted from a critical realist perspective. To find out more about the dynamics at play in this working relationship, semi-structured individual interviews were carried out with five teachers and five TAs across two primary schools. The data was subsequently analysed using thematic analysis. This illuminated six themes: 'power dynamic'; 'occupying different spaces'; 'interpersonal and intrapersonal factors'; 'systemic factors'; 'nature of the relationship'; and 'reflection on the relationship'. Each theme is described in detail and presented visually in a thematic map. The relationship between the themes is also discussed. The theme of 'power dynamic' in particular was found to have an effect on the other themes. The results are discussed in relation to previous literature, as well as theoretical frameworks relating to power, psychodynamic theory, and attachment theory. The strengths and limitations of this research are outlined alongside suggestions for future research. Potential implications for practice are then highlighted. For Educational Psychologists (EPs) this includes having both teachers and TAs present during consultations about students, facilitating 3supervision groups for teachers and TAs, and delivering training for these staff members on how to work together effectively. The thesis ends with self-reflections on the research journey.

This research explored the experiences of three secondary headteachers and the way in which role conception, informed by unconscious processes, functions as a mechanism for managing the stresses and demands of said role. The research was underpinned by a psychosocial framework and used an explicitly psychoanalytic epistemology. The research used semi-structured interviews to explore influential biographical factors, which were then explored using a psychoanalytic lens. This produced a series of themes used to thematically analyse their accounts of their jobs and the stresses and strains within it. The ensuing analysis revealed that the unconscious patterns, implicit in their narratives, influenced both role conception and the way they perceived and related to the organisations they led. In discussing these findings, links were made to relevant psychoanalytic and systems-psychodynamic theory; especially Bion's work on containment and alpha function, as well as Rice's seminal thinking about the way in which the unconscious influences role acquisition and task engagement. Further applications to both theories are suggested. A central argument is that working with school leaders has a systemic impact on schools and school populations, something well within the remit and consultative skill-set of Educational Psychologists. This research concludes that unconscious patterns and processes are involved in the management of stress and anxiety and that this is done through unconsciously "shaping" the way headteachers conceive of the role and the schools they lead.

This thesis explores the stories of three women. They are different stories connected by experiences of first or second generation migration, ambiguous identities, belonging and otherness. I also connect the stories as I am one of the women, my cousin is another and the third is my friend. My interest is both personal and professional as this research serves both my personal interest in our lives and careers, and my professional concern as a practitioner about the development of career counselling practice to meet the needs of clients. The search for and interpretation of meaning (Bruner,1990) informed the methodology and analysis of this work. I do not seek a ‘truthful account’ of our stories, accurate in their telling, but a ‘truth seeking’ narrative, what memories and stories mean to the teller. The methodology is auto/biographical. I began the research where my thoughts and questions began, with my own story. This is neither autobiographical nor biographical research, it is an interplay between the two. The ‘/’ both connects and divides my story and those of my participants (Merrill and West, 2009). I reflected upon images, memories, collage and discussion about my own life and career. The stories of my co-participants, gathered through loosely structured interview and using artefacts, poems and family histories, are rich in themselves but their intersection with my own story is also part of the heuristic nature of the methodology. The interviews, lasting one to two hours, were recorded and fully transcribed, and those transcripts shared with my co-participants for accuracy. A second interview, after a period of reflection on the transcription was conducted with one participant. In this follow-up interview, questions were shaped by events and elements in the story that were of particular interest and were then able to be explored further. With the other participant a full weekend of discussion followed the interview, which brought in other family members, reflections and stories. The analysis of the material is holistic and considers the ethnography, process and Gestalt of our interactions (Merrill and West, 2009). The meaning in these lives and careers is a co-construction from themes within each story and also the shared meaning between them. The three stories present windows into very different lives and careers, but also into recognisable and shared struggles and resolutions. Although personal agency is at the heart of each story, this is set within and shaped by the family, history and communities in which each of us grew. The work of Jung (1938), Adler (1923), Frosh (1991) and later of Savickas (2011) provided some theoretical ‘heavy lifting’ in understanding the relationship between personal identities and career. Each is invited into the thesis to comment upon and to illuminate the processes at work in this shared space. They help to understand the relationship between the threads and themes in these stories and how they create a tapestry of meaning for the teller. Insights into the three stories offer a critique of the dominant models of professional practice in career counselling. Such critique follows a now well established paradigm shift in career theory in response to the changing nature of work and of social structures (Bauman, 2000; 2005: Frosh, 1991) and an increased interest in contextualism in career counselling (Richardson, 2002). Social constructionist theories and models include Savickas’ (2011) Career Construction Theory in which he identified the significance of pre-occupations as threads that accompany us through career and life, connecting the plots, characters and scripts into a story that in the telling has meaning and purpose. Pre-occupations in our three stories were identified from themes in the interviews and in other material and the pre-occupation that united us was the clarification and construction of our identities. Sometimes it was a clear and painful roar and sometimes a quiet question hidden within micronarratives that were re-membered in our conversations. Career provided us with a stage whereon identity was more or less resolved and reconstructed. The significance of the relationship between personal and career identity emerges as the key argument of this thesis and a counter narrative for career counselling. It provides an alternative to neoliberal, individualistic, outcome driven practice (Irving, 2013), and has at its heart an acknowledgement of the relationship between who we believe ourselves to be and what we do in our lives. I conclude that such a counter narrative must be illustrated first within the development of the curriculum for the training and education of careers practitioners. It must also be reflected in the development of models of career theory and counselling. In this way it will be secured within the practice of careers professionals for future generations. On a broader level there is much that the exploration into the relationship between personal and career identity can illuminate outside the specific context of career counselling. Social and political concerns about radicalisation and the construction of identity in migrant communities may be illuminated by the insights offered by this thesis. Moreover as identities become more mixed and complex in ‘liquid modern’ worlds (Bauman, 2000) this thesis offers a further understanding of the scaffolding that is needed for identity construction and life planning, when traditional structures are hard to find.

Taiwan has many high-level music colleges that prepare students for performance and teaching careers. These music colleges are competitive environments in which students are potentially learning to cope with musical performance anxiety (MPA). MPA has been widely researched in recent years. Studies have found that college musicians use their own unique coping strategies or rely on past experiences of coping with MPA to manage it. Nevertheless, literature that focuses on MPA self-management is still limited. The aim of this thesis is to fill this gap by investigating the ways in which MPA is self-managed by Taiwanese college musicians (TCMs). The research questions are: 1) How do TCMs define and perceive MPA? 2) How do TCMs self-manage MPA? 3) What strategies for managing MPA do the TCMs believe they will use with their students when they carry out teaching as part of their future portfolio careers? Fifty-three undergraduates were recruited from a music college in Taiwan. Each participant was interviewed before all of their performances taking place in one semester: formal concert, exam, and graduate recital. The data was analysed through a qualitative approach by using thematic analysis in order to examine the strategies used and the process of managing MPA. The findings are presented as four themes: 1) Strategies used in preparation for different types of performance, during different time periods of preparation and performance. 2) Strategies in context: people and places. 3) Understanding the strategies: metacognition in musical learning and managing MPA. 4) MPA self-management and the teaching-learning cycle. Results revealed that it is possible for TCMs to self-manage their MPA through developing metacognitive processes with support networks in the conservatoire environment and with various external resources. However, information on MPA-coping strategies are like pieces of a puzzle that are scattered rather than being coherently fitted together. Therefore, recommendations for further research and applications to practice are made.

Stress in music performance shows an intrinsic relationship with changes in cardiovascular functioning and emotions, yet to date, studies analysing these stress indicators are few and far between. The overarching aim of this thesis is therefore to investigate performance stress through the lens of both self-reported anxiety and physical stress signatures in heart rate variability. For rigour, this is achieved through a close examination of the relationship between stress and structural complexity of heart rate variability in response to different conditions musicians underwent: (1) a low- and high-stress performance and (2) a simulated performance environment. In my thesis I approached the problem in a comprehensive way and investigated five Studies. Studies 1 and 2 (Chapters 3 and 4) employ new heart rate variability methods to analyse physical stress. Study 3 (Chapter 5) compares heart rate variability responses before and during a performance in a simulated and a real-life performance environment; Study 4 (Chapter 6) qualitatively addresses further enhancements related to simulated performance environments. Study 5 (Chapter 7) examines heart rate variability responses to simulated performance feedback of different emotional valence. Results provide conclusive evidence that musicians performing in high-stress conditions display lower levels of structural complexity in the heart rate variability (signature of high stress), in particular prior to the performance, and a statistically significant elevation of subjective anxiety. The findings show that both simulated and real performance scenarios create similar physical and emotional responses. Interviews with musicians reveal the benefits of simulations in combination with complementary training methods. More immediate follow-up research may focus on heart rate variability responses to other training strategies, such as Alexander Technique and physical exercise; use a greater selection of standardised self-assessments; and evaluate musicians experiencing severe performance stress, for which this thesis has paved the way.

Looked after children have been identified by successive governments as a vulnerable group who have persistently demonstrated poor outcomes across a range of measures, including educational attainment and social inclusion (DfE, 2012a). The 2010 Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government has identified narrowing the gap between this group and their peers as a key priority, and Paired Reading is one intervention that has been shown to improve literacy levels when implemented with looked after children (Osborne et al., 2010), with further potential value in strengthening the adult-child relationship through their shared engagement in the reading process (Topping, 2001). A mixed methods design measuring reading across three time points was used to assess the impact of a Paired Reading intervention with looked after children and their carers on the children’s reading levels. Although a significant difference was found for two of the measures of reading progress, a more detailed analysis of the data suggests that there was wide variation in both pre- and post- intervention scores. The results from this research suggest that Paired Reading may be an effective intervention for some looked after children, but that a differential analysis of individual child needs is required prior to implementation, taking into consideration children’s previous life experiences, literacy performance and relationship with their carer.

The need for cost-effective interventions for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and related conditions is growing rapidly. Recent research suggests that only a limited number of individuals who are eligible for intervention are actually receiving such services. This thesis first discusses the current evidence-base for interventions aimed at young children with ASD. It then outlines a frequent oversight in the literature regarding motor development and resonance difficulties in this population, which forms the basis for developing motor-based interventions for these individuals. Two large-scale experimental school-based studies are then presented which examine the effects of an ABA-based high-intensity physical exercise as an effective intervention for children with ASD and other Special Educational Needs (SEN). In one study, this intervention is compared with a low-intensity exercise program. Results indicate that high-intensity physical exercise results in significant short-term (0-to-90 minute), but not long-term (24 hours+), improvements in cognitive/behavioral flexibility (executive functions) in students with ASD and students with SEN. Furthermore, both high-intensity and low-intensity exercise resulted in significant reductions in stress, in both the short-term and long-term in students with ASD and students with SEN. These findings provide direct evidence for the effectiveness of physical exercise as a school-based intervention.