Local Offer

You have probably arrived at this page via a local authority's Local Offer web pages. Below are our answers to the most common questions about our contribution to the Local Offer where you live.

All of these questions are answered in more detail on other pages of this website, particularly the Services and FAQs pages, so please do explore the information here via the menu above. We hope you find this useful. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you would like to know more about the services we offer.

1. What does your service do?

Solent Psychology is an independent educational psychology service. We offer assessments of the strengths and difficulties of children, young people and adults with special educational needs and disabilities. We also offer problem-solving consultations, advice and training to professionals and parents.

2. Where is it located and what areas does it cover?

We are based in Portsmouth and we work across the Solent region including West Sussex, Hampshire, Southampton and the Isle of Wight.

3. Who does your service provide for?

Most of our work is with children, young people and adults in the 0 to 25 age range. Our areas of expertise are: child and adolescent development; language and communication skills; learning strengths and difficulties; and social, emotional and behavioural development. We are also able to offer cognitive and learning/literacy attainment assessments for older adults, for example mature students applying for undergraduate degree courses or teacher training.

4. How can I start using the service?

We have an open referral system. This means we accept referrals from schools, parents and a wide range of professionals, and adults and young people can refer themselves to the service. Parental consent is required for us to meet and work with children and young people who are not able to give this consent themselves.

As we are an independent educational psychology service we charge service users for the work that we do, unless we have been commissioned by a local authority or other organisation to provide a service free of charge.

5. How are decisions made about who can use your service?

We offer our services to everyone in the community who wishes to access our advice but we have to charge service users as outlined in 4 above.

6. How do you communicate with service users and how are they involved with decision making?

There is a great deal of information on our website detailing what we offer. There are information leaflets on our Downloads page. Service users can contact us by phone or email whilst we are working with them and we answer follow-up questions and requests for clarification after we have finished working with them at no additional cost. We are very happy to liaise and work with translation services but we are unable to offer these ourselves. We provide written reports as a basic part of the service we offer. We offer training courses aimed at parents and carers. These are listed on our Services page.

7. Is your service fully accessible?

We usually visit service users at preschool, school, college or in their own homes and we are therefore able to be very flexible in the way that we offer our services. We operate a full service during school holiday periods.

8. What training are the staff supporting children and young people with SEND having or have had?

We are educational psychologists registered with the Health and Care Professions Council who require us to engage in regular professional development and training as well as professional supervision in order to meet their mandatory quality standards.

9. Who can I contact for further information?

Initial and general enquiries can be made by phone or by email. We can normally provide a quicker response to emails as we are able to reply 'out of hours'. Contact details are on our website. Service users should contact the psychologist who is working directly with them, who will give them their contact details at the start of their involvement.