Presenters: Alejandra Perez, Elena Panagiotopoulou, Ruth Roberts, Mariana Pereira, Maria-Christina Vourda (Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families)
Format: Short presentation
The restructure of the MSc programme of Early Child Development and Clinical Applications was conceived and led by Alejandra Perez successfully, despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, with support from Elena Panagiotopoulou and Ruth Roberts. After gathering feedback in a survey with 82 alumni, the core team was in thorough conversations with staff and external heads of training for over 2 years. The main challenges MSc students faced when completing the course were 1) not being able to go on to further academic and clinical training due to lack of work experience and/or research work, and 2) not being able to find work in a related field immediately after the MSc. Few students pursued publishing their research or observation work, or stayed in the field. This resulted in deterring strong applicants to the course and teaching staff having to tailor their teaching to students with various academic levels and interest in the course. The restructuring focused on developing four areas to address these problems, that, together, paint a more innovative and supporting picture of our students’ academic experience and future employability!
The pieces of the restructuring, towards innovation and employability:
🧩 A range of opportunities for employability
This 2-year MSc offers multiple opportunities for skill and professional development across various fields and routes in the field of child and parental mental health. In preparation for a clinical career, this MSc offers clinical skills and is recognised as a pre-clinical course for the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy training. It also includes a 1-year clinical placement and supervision at the setting as well as the course. To foster research/academic skills, a 2-year research project is offered to the students, with individual supervision and a range of topics. More than 50% of the projects include external collaborators and can have a range of methods (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods), target populations, and topics. The students are highly encouraged to publish their dissertations in peer-reviewed journals upon completion. Finally, the course offers “Integration and Development Seminars” that further develop skills that can be applied not only to their academic, clinical, and research skills, but also more transversal knowledge to prepare them for other careers such as public engagement or industry.
🧩 Adopting a course tutor model
The MSc modules are supported by course tutors, who deliver weekly workshop activities after each lecture in order to potentiate knowledge consolidation, concept expansion and integration, and critical and original thinking. The activities are developed using the most creative and up to date methods to ensure accessible, engaging, personalised, and active learning. Some of these practices, namely the development of “gamified workshops”, have been recognised in Mariana Pereira’s fellowship awarded by the Higher Education Academy.
🧩 Innovative assessments
The MSc carefully considered the methods of assessment in the restructuring of the course and created a range of different assessments that would help students to not only show their knowledge in different ways, but also help them to develop useful skills. Currently the course assesses students through traditional methods such as exams and essays, but also employs novel methods, including a podcast, a blog post, a leaflet and a TED talk to convey knowledge to lay audiences, and video and clinical analysis to demonstrate clinical competencies.
🧩 The active involvement of LEAP
The Lab of Experiences and Adjustments in Parenthood (LEAP) is a recently established research group, with the aim of providing on-going MSc research projects on the course’ core topics. The focus of the lab is to better understand parents’ subjective experiences through different stages of parenthood, focusing on the complex interconnections of parent, infant, and social/contextual factors in the parent-child relationship and children’s mental health, employing a range of qualitative, quantitative, observational and experimental methods. The creation of LEAP was a core component of the MSc restructuring, producing “in-house” knowledge, hosting research projects, and providing student training, with the support of Maria-Christina as a project coordinator.
Big picture – what are the outcomes and the future steps?
This restructuring has led to a significant improvement in the provision of student support not only in terms of learning experience, but also in developing employability skills. In less than 2 years, the MSc has become a leading course in early child development and has received excellent feedback from students and external examiners, and has attracted a high number of strong applicants. In summary, the restructured programme has introduced a range of assessments, hence offering opportunities for diverse skills to be developed; prompted diversity in teaching staff/guest speakers; included a novel course tutoring model with weekly workshop activities, helping students integrate research and clinical work; developed a new series of seminars fostering academic, research, clinical, and public engagement skills; and supported students in developing a diverse skillset for future careers in academia, clinical settings, or the industry.
We need to continue monitoring student satisfaction of the course, number of students that get on to further academic and clinical training, and publish their MSc work. We would like to see students be part of creating a platform for change where academic knowledge can be translated into practice and research, whilst pioneering new ways of working in the field of child and parental mental health in the early years.
If this sounds interesting and you want to discuss our approach, please get in touch or visit the course website!