Ms Siobhan Thomas:

I would love to address what the lack of diversity in psychology does to the discipline as a whole. It is an important question, as that lack does a great deal of damage. Clinical psychology has become so competitive that many people have to move location or work for free to get experience. This penalises the chances of there being any kind of diversity, in particular socio-economic diversity. It immediately prices out people who are working class or who cannot afford to work for free because of family reasons, their backgrounds, etc. It penalises people who have mental health difficulties or other health difficulties that mean they cannot drive, for example. Being able to drive is a major requirement in most assistant psychology posts. If they cannot drive, they do not get the chance to gain the experience they need. When a service is self-selecting those who can work for free, we have to wonder how much the gap is widening between the psychologists who are providing services and the people who are receiving those services.

We are not rewarding diversity of experience. We are not rewarding lived experience of mental health issues and we are making sure that the psychologists who are being trained to treat people have such massively different experiences to those who are coming to be treated. We have made it very clear that we do not care about lived experience, or diversity in encouraging people from lower socioeconomic status or from people with disabilities or mental health issues. It is obvious that these people do not belong in clinical psychology because they simply just cannot afford to get to the stage where they would be trained. I am happy for my colleagues to add to my comments.