Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of introducing a centralised system that pays for bursaries for trainee educational psychologists.

Since 2020, we have increased the number of educational psychologists whose training we fund, from 160, to over 200 per academic year. This is delivered through contracts with two consortia, led by the University of Manchester, and University College London.

The department funds trainees’ bursary payments for the first year of their training course, while bursaries for the second and third years are funded by the local authorities where the trainees are deployed. We do not have plans to introduce a centralised system for this.