Welcome to ASK Psychology’s first-ever Blog Post! In this post, we’d like to introduce you to ASK Psychology and tell you a little bit more about who we are, what we do and how we work!
Why ASK you ask?
Our three founding members of ASK Psychology are Dr Amelia Taylor, Sarah Brook and Dr Kate Hodgson. Amelia, Sarah and Kate became ASK- you see what we did there!
In 2023, we were all working within the Local Authority. Sarah was working in a Northeast Local Authority, whilst Kate and Amelia were both working at a Virtual School.
Collectively, we had amassed over 30 years of experience working within Northeast based Local Authorities and services and have learned so much from both our experiences with the LA and the amazing educational psychologists we worked alongside.
After reflecting on our experiences and all we had to offer, we felt it was time to work a little differently. We were ready to carve out a new path and build something which would allow us to draw on these experiences and apply our own practices and principles. So, in September 2023, after lots of work behind the scenes, we launched ASK Psychology.
Getting things off the ground
We had all dabbled in private work and our loyal clients wanted to continue to work with us. Thankfully our good reputation preceded us and the requests from schools began to grow. Schools and settings were interested in our way of working and within weeks we were working at capacity. It quickly became apparent that our team of three needed to grow!
Growing the ASK Family
We successfully recruited our first associate, another educational psychologist, to the team. It then immediately became clear that building relationships would be key to our work. We wanted to build a team that offered flexibility and a healthy work-life balance. We wanted to develop a service with a variety of different projects. We wanted all our team to have the freedom to try different ways of working which focussed on the current and individual needs of the school communities they were working with.
Word got out and it became clear that more and more professionals wanted to work in this way too!
One year later…!
Whilst we knew that we valued working with different Psychologists, we also wanted to expand and become a multidisciplinary team.
Onboard, we now have educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, a psychotherapeutic counsellor and an assistant psychologist as well as a wonderful communications manager.
We are a truly diverse team and we are lucky to work together and be able to learn so much from each other with well-being and the building of positive relationships at the heart of everything we do. Every team member is fully supported and has their own educational psychologist supervisor and access to regular peer supervision sessions. There are plenty of socials and team get-togethers too of course!
We provide training which we write together, creative opportunities to develop online packages, conference opportunities, systemic group and individual work with schools as well as time to research, develop and pilot resources.
We offer flexible working, and the freedom to develop projects and relationships both within the team and with the schools and organisations we support. In the current climate, where increasingly, professionals are working in silos with minimal opportunity for collaborative working – we think we offer something pretty unique in the current climate of education.
Room for one more?
As the good news has spread and our reputation has thrived, so has the demand for ASK Psychology. We are still recruiting and are always on the lookout for the right people to join our expanding team.
If you’d like any further information about our current vacancies or feel you have something to offer our team. Please feel free to drop us a line at ask@askpsychology.uk