All cahnge - CEO Ioan Rees, Sycol Consultant Claire Darwin and Hull psychologist Lisa StanleyTransforming lives with psychology: Making positive change possible

When the decision was taken to move to a ‘Traded Services’ model within the Hull City Psychological Service at Hull City Council, they knew they would need support in managing this major change so they asked us here at Sycol to get involved.

The team were asked to continue improving the way they did things and their success depended on the services they offered being purchased by educational establishments across the city. The council quickly realised that what was needed was to go back to basics and to look at core values and culture – which is why they ask Sycol to work with their team.

Sycol Ltd has a great track record of working with organisations to create a culture of high-performance – particularly within education and Children’s Services. As well as performing interim Principal Educational Psychology duties, our consultants are working to develop the strong team and coach people within the team to become leaders.

Our work is still in progress. The Educational Psychologists, council colleagues and stakeholders are seeing great results already. The objective is to create a culture where the Educational Psychologists can successfully increase their traded service once our work with them is complete at the end of the year.

We have worked with the Educational Psychologists, head teachers and colleagues, including business support, in order to streamline several systems. For example, referral and quality assurance processes.

The Educational Psychologists have worked with colleagues and stakeholders in order to clarify their core professional purpose, to communicate which services are commissioned by the City Council and which services can be commissioned by schools and educational settings. They are currently working on communicating this across Hull City (and beyond).


We’ll be revisiting the service in 2016 and asking them how they’ve progressed – watch this space!

Image courtesy of jeasdaphorn at FreeDigitalPhotos.net