The NAPEP Annual Course 2024 will be hosting an impressive line up of keynotes and speakers. As always our speakers are guaranteed to inspire and educate.
The full speaker programme will be available in due course.
Professor Emla Fitzsimons
Professor of Economics at University College London
Emla Fitzsimons is a Professor of Economics at UCL. Since 2014 she has been the Principal Investigator of the Millennium Cohort Study, a major nationally representative longitudinal study following over 19,000 children born at the turn of the millennium.
Her research is focused on understanding and evidencing the early emergence of inequalities and their influence on outcomes and experiences, both in childhood and adulthood. Recent work includes the impact of breastfeeding on children’s cognitive development and health, and the long-term implications of early cognitive and socio-emotional inequalities for adult outcomes.
She has expertise in quantitative methods drawn from econometrics and other quantitative social science disciplines, and is particularly interested in the application of methods that strengthen causal identification. Prior to joining the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Emla was Co-Director of the Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She completed her PhD in Economics at UCL in 2004.
Evidence on the Lives of Children of the New Century
Emla's talk will provide an overview of and reflections on the Millennium Cohort Study, a UK-wide nationally representative study of a large cohort of children born in the UK at the turn of the millennium. It started off with just over 19,000 children and families, and it is following their journeys through life at multiple timepoints and across multiple domains.
The talk will showcase evidence on how and when inequalities emerge in children’s development, some of the drivers of these and their enduring influence in young people's lives. The talk will discuss how the study has been influential in shaping policy in different spheres, including children's and young people’s mental health and wellbeing.
Dr Helena Bunn
Helena is a Doctor in Educational and Child Psychology. She is a Programme Director at the University of East London, where she coordinates the professional development of the future Educational Psychologists. Helena also holds a Senior Educational Psychologist role in Norfolk Local Authority, where she advises on legal matters related to professional practice and supervises professional practice of Educational Psychologists. More recently, Helena became a chair elect for the British Psychological Society, Division of Educational and Child Psychology National Committee.
Helena has practiced both in the UK and abroad, where she co-designed and delivered a range of inclusion training programmes to schools and wrote literature in this aspect. She was involved in international activities focused on learning and sharing experience in the areas of Special Educational Needs practices and support systems for disadvantaged children (immigrant and publicly fostered), before coming to England and continuing her professional and research involvement in Special Educational Needs.
Dr James Wood
James is the principal Educational Psychologist for Wiltshire Council. He is privileged to lead (or, more accurately, be led by…) an amazing, warm, and passionate team of EPs, Assistant EPs, and TEPs. He has held this role for approximately 5 years, having previously worked as a maingrade EP in Wiltshire. In what feels like the distant past, he trained at Southampton University as part of the first cohort of doctoral trainee EPs.
A predecessor of James' described the PEP role as one of protecting the EPs from the rest of the local authority, whilst simultaneously protecting the rest of the authority from the EPs, and that seems about right! That said, we are lucky in Wiltshire to work alongside an excellent SEND team, and together we are just about managing to weather the storm of EHCNAs and the meltdown of the SEND system.
In his spare time James love to be immersed in music, the arts, the sea, and the sunshine. And, of course, time with his wonderful family.
EBSNA: exploring the
PEP role in persistent non-attendance
Dr Catherine Kelly
Catherine is assistant director on the Doctorate in Educational and Child Psychology at the University of Manchester and a senior educational psychologist for the educational psychology service in Bury Metropolitan Council. Her research interests are in social justice, culturally responsive practice and educational psychologists’ work with multilingual children and families.
An opportunity to explore a resource, constructed with principal and
senior educational psychologists, to reflect on social justice in
educational psychology service delivery.
Melissa Jones
Melissa has spent two years in the PEP role in the large rural county of Staffordshire, taking a traditional SEND focused EPS into the 21st century via a renewed focus on psychology, relationships and research, and increasing job meaning and impact of the Eps in the service. She feels eternally lucky to have a particularly talented teams of EPS, AEPs and TEPs who keep surprising her with their creativity and innovation, as an example, the EPS was shortlisted recently for the county innovation awards for our digital literacy intervention. Prior to this she held a senior and then acting PEP role in Solihull where she specialised in SEMH and ran a team to successfully reduce exclusions using psychological processes and before this spent a further 8 years in Birmingham in specialist senior and senior roles.
Melissa embarked on to a PhD two years ago, investigating behavioural economics and its utility to educational psychology, and is due to finish next year. When she is not working, she likes to spend time with her family and friends as well as running, hiking, and gardening.
NAPEP 2024
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