'Speaking with one voice with different accents'

Could you tell me your story, Sharon – how did you come to be where you are now, both in terms of your role at the Open University and becoming Chair of the Welsh Branch?

In a previous life, I was the head of an EBD Emotionally Behaviourally Difficult school – as they were called then – and I reached a point in my career where I needed a change. I went back to university to study occupational psychology, and then worked as a research psychologist in a maternity hospital.

I came to the Open University as an associate lecturer because I really love working with students who perhaps aren't your usual brick-university type students. While I was working as an associate lecturer at the Open University, I became a member of their student support team, where I worked as an education adviser and worked for several years.

I did a lot of outreach work in Wales with the Open University and then became a Staff Tutor, line managing associate lecturers and getting involved with the curriculum. I became engaged with the BPS Welsh Branch committee because I'd been a member of the BPS and was wondering what the committee was doing for me. I reached out to the chair at the time and asked what was happening in Wales, and they asked me to join. I was then asked to be the new chair and voted in after a few years.

How did you come to work alongside the Senedd through the Welsh Branch, and what's your approach?

We were really pleased when the BPS recognised that we needed dedicated support to deliver our public affairs strategy in Wales, recognising that we have a different government and legislature and a different NHS, social services and education system in Wales. Our lightbulbs all went on when Manel Tippett, BPS Senior Public Affairs Adviser for Wales, joined the Society. Without her, we couldn't be doing all the work we're doing and wouldn't have become as influential as we're becoming – she really knows her stuff!

I think my role as Chair of the branch is about working with members in their divisions and areas of work and trying to bring them together. Sometimes you get a policy that we want to contribute to, and we don't just need clinical psychologists, or just health psychologists, or just forensic psychologists, we need everybody. 

Often, the policies we work on are national, and psychologists from all of the divisions and areas of work/interests can contribute. When we're asked to comment on policies, we send them to all of our members in Wales and ask for their contribution. It should be about the whole community of psychologists in Wales, and working together on responding to policies means we're speaking with one voice with different accents.

What policy-related activities have you been involved with recently?

We've just finished our manifesto for the next Senedd election. The key things we've included are about building a sustainable psychology workforce and placing psychology at the heart of the public health agenda. I see part of my role as being about educating people like the NHS and employers about what psychology is, what it's good for and what psychologists do. Meeting the growing demand for additional learning needs is also in our manifesto.

We've joined the newly formed Allied Healthcare Professionals Federation Cymru, which is a group of AHP membership bodies that jointly advocate for improving the links between health services and supporting the AHPs that work within. I also work with stakeholder groups, including those in NHS workforce planning, about how to get Welsh people into the NHS in Wales – a lot of people live in Wales and want to stay in Wales, but often they need to go elsewhere to train or work.

As part of placing psychology at the heart of public health, we're now working with Professor Jim McManus, director of Public Health Wales, to build the links between psychology and public health. As psychologists, we're bad at trumpeting what we do and what we do well. We're hosting an impact-sharing event in June where public health and psychology are coming together to showcase case studies and talk about where we've had impact for the wellbeing of the nation. From that, we're hoping to put together a symposium paper to send to the Senedd to say, 'this is the amazing stuff we are doing in Wales that is improving the wellbeing and health of the nation'.

Can you also tell me about your work with students and career paths for psychology graduates?

I'm very, very much about the opportunities, particularly for our Welsh graduates and our Welsh students. It started with my passion about students in Wales at the OU, but it's now all students who go to any Welsh University. We're the poorest nation out of the four, and our students have some of the fewest opportunities, so I feel passionate about working with psychology graduates and helping them on their journey to employment.

We've got a programme in the OU in Wales called the National Enrichment Programme, which works with further education colleges and sixth formers. We're having three big events between September and December to showcase what psychology is, what's going on in research in psychology, and what it's like to do a psychology degree, showcasing all nine Welsh Universities. We'll also have student ambassadors there to speak about their experiences and psychologists to talk about their jobs. It'll be aimed at people who either study psychology or have an interest in it.

Another project we are doing, in collaboration with the BPS and British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, is developing an OpenLearn platform where we've got three key questions: what is psychology, counselling and therapy, what do psychologists, counsellors and therapists do, and what is it good for? It will include careers, but it will also be debunking myths. It will be about educating, not just people about psychology, but also employers as to what sort of skill sets our graduates may have and what different types of psychologists can do and offer to organisations.

Are there any areas you'd particularly like to focus on in the future?

I want to work more with workforce planning for the future and develop the career paths for our psychology graduates. For example, quite a few psychology graduates train to become speech and language therapists, but that isn't a career path that is typically well-known among psychology graduates. We could do more to work with stakeholders and workforce planning groups in developing career paths for psychology graduates and raising awareness of career paths.