Abstract
This article mobilises archival material from local authorities in England to assess the shifting role of psychologists within local school health services from the 1930s through to the reorganisation of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1974. It argues that psychologists were increasingly positioned between therapist, diagnostician and social worker, that this was bound together with a local discourse of children’s emotional well-being and that the increasing fluidity of the psychologist’s role emerged from local policies designed to stress the ‘educational’ nature of their role. In so doing, it extends work by John Stewart on child guidance and more long-standing histories of local, ‘municipal’ medical services. It suggests ways in which the older, localised provision of public health services in Britain persisted after the creation of the NHS and argues the need for a more flexible understanding of what was ‘medical’ about the local welfare state in this period.
Highlights
This article mobilises archival material from local authorities in England to assess the shifting role of psychologists within local school health services from the 1930s through to the reorganisation of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1974. It argues that psychologists were increasingly positioned between therapist, diagnostician and social worker, that this was bound together with a local discourse of children’s emotional well-being and that the increasing fluidity of the psychologist’s role emerged from local policies designed to stress the ‘educational’ nature of their role
It extends work by John Stewart on child guidance and more long-standing histories of local, ‘municipal’ medical services. It suggests ways in which the older, localised provision of public health services in Britain persisted after the creation of the NHS and argues the need for a more flexible understanding of what was ‘medical’ about the local welfare state in this period
The Ministry’s response signals that it viewed the psychologist’s role as a conduit between the two sites of intervention in the form of the school and the clinic. It was this which may lie behind the trend towards increasing psychologisation that has been noted in relation to child guidance by Stewart and prefigures Underwood’s later recommendation in his 1956 report that the psychologist should take on more administrative influence
Summary
The Ministry’s response signals that it viewed the psychologist’s role as a conduit between the two sites of intervention in the form of the school and the clinic It was this which may lie behind the trend towards increasing psychologisation that has been noted in relation to child guidance by Stewart and prefigures Underwood’s later recommendation in his 1956 report that the psychologist should take on more administrative influence.. What does emerge most forcefully in this consideration of Brighton, Birmingham and Leicester is the shift in power towards the psychologist identified by Stewart and something with which few scholars of this topic have engaged explicitly: the shifting nomenclature away from the child guidance model towards a ‘school psychological service’ This name both foregrounded the educational qualities and the psychological aspects, to the detriment of the teamwork approach of the interwar period, and highlighted further ambiguities surrounding the service’s medical claims. Journal (Clinical Research Edition), 1987, 295, 395. 107TNA, ED 137/256, Hugh Paul, ‘The Health of the Children of Smethwick for the year 1948’ [SMO’s report], 10, 31. 108See Crane, Child Protection in England
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