Katy Cole

Educational Psychologist

Dr Katy Cole is the module lead for Child Development Assessment and Intervention and Year 2 lead for our Doctorate course in Child, community and educational psychology (M4) within the Child and Family Directorate at the Tavistock Centre.

Katy trained and worked as a primary school teacher before completing a Master’s degree in Educational Psychology at University College London in 2005. She has worked as an educational psychologist and senior educational psychologist in local authorities for over 15 years. She now works with individual schools, local area groups and local authorities to provide consultation, training, assessment, and supervision.

Katy values being involved in the training and development of educational psychologists and school staff. She has extensive experience of supervising trainees, educational psychologists, and school professionals. She has delivered county-wide schools training, coordinated continuous professional development in an Educational Psychology Service and is a module lead on the Tavistock training course.

Katy has an interest in affective aspects of practice and supporting mental health and emotional wellbeing in schools and communities. This was a focus of her doctoral research where she carried out psychosocial research into the experiences of Educational Psychologists in working with domestic abuse. She was involved in developing the Tavistock and Portman Digital Academy course for Senior Mental Health Leads and has delivered seminars and webinars around this topic.

She developed resources for critical incident support in a local authority EPS and has worked on county wide suicide-prevention projects. As a volunteer, she has run mental health sessions for young people and facilitates a ‘tastelife’ community course on eating disorders.

Katy’s research interests link to supervision, psychosocial methods in EP practice and evidence-based interventions for cognition and learning.