Addressing threats to the discipline of psychology

Professor Simon Crowe FAPS

The APS is sometimes mistakenly referred to as an exclusively practitioner-focused Society. Whilst the initiatives associated with Medicare rebating of services provided by psychology practitioners and the consequential effects that this has had on the activities of the Society have been substantial, in my time as President I have tried to achieve a greater focus on the discipline of psychology that underpins psychological practice. To this end, recent initiatives introduced by the APS have included:

1. Maintaining a consistent commitment to the publication of the new empirical research of psychologists in Australia by improving our fleet of scientific journals
2. Providing all members of our Society with the means to engage in evidence-based practice by facilitating access to the current scientific literature published in the journals of the Psychology and Behavioural Sciences Collection on the EBSCO database
3. Hosting numerous academic conferences including six major conferences in Australia in this year, five of these attached to our Colleges and the other being our regular Annual Conference held in Canberra.

Despite these efforts, it is clear that the discipline of psychological science in Australia has never faced the level of threat that it does in the current environment. These threats operate on a number of fronts, as detailed below.

• Academic workforce issues
  • The ageing of the academic workforce
  • The increasing shift of student postgraduate cohorts away from research-focussed higher degrees (i.e., PhD) to practitioner-focussed degrees (i.e., Masters or DPsych)
• Practitioner workforce issues
  • A systematic and sustained workforce shortage of suitably qualified psychology practitioners
  • The lack of appropriate incentives from government to universities to provide sufficient training places
  • The heightened regulation and scrutiny being brought to bear from the Psychology Board of Australia since the implementation of national registration
  • The perceived waste inherent in training a large cohort of students to the end of the third year only for them not to be employable in any position that includes ‘psychology or psychologist’ in its title
• Financial viability
  • The burgeoning threat of increases in student numbers arising from the implementation in 2012 of the major reforms recommended in the Bradley report, with the associated implication of providing these programs in the context of less educationally prepared students entering the first year
  • The erosion of formal practical classes in the undergraduate psychology sequence at many universities
  • The financial burden to the universities associated with providing postgraduate Master’s and Doctoral level training of practitioners due to significant shortfalls in government funding for this costly training
• Psychological research viability
  • The effects of the Excellence in Research in Australia (ERA) exercise and the implications of this for the research mission of the 39 universities in Australia who offer psychology
  • The decreasing number of students completing research PhDs
  • The threat to fourth year studies arising from the development of Bologna-style training programs (e.g., the Melbourne Model)
• The effect of psychology's outreach to the wider community
  • Despite this, the psychological literacy of the general public is still not well developed
  • Whilst there has been uptake of secondary school-level psychology in some States, the uptake across the nation has been inconsistent.

None of these problems is easily solved and most represent the accumulated effects of years of government cuts and haphazard policy development within the sector. Clearly we cannot solve all of these problems by pulling the blanket up over our heads and hoping that they will go away. The approach we must take is to develop a plan of attack and to coordinate this through all of the organisations and institutes which are committed to the importance of the science of the discipline of psychology.

In response to these threats and as the Presidential Initiative for my term of office, I have established the Future of Psychological Science in Australia Taskforce to address the threats to the psychology discipline and to create a vision and a road map for the future of the discipline and the Society going forward to the year 2020.

The goals of the Taskforce will centre on identifying:

• Opportunities for the development of the psychology discipline based on the needs of academics, students and the public
• Strategies and tactics to most effectively address these opportunities
• Ways to develop and enhance sustainable partnerships between the key stakeholders to implement new directions for the discipline and the development of a common public policy agenda
• A ten-year vision for the future of the discipline of psychology.

It is my hope that the development of a set of directions for the higher education sector, with the assistance of the Society, will allow us to more systematically and consistently understand how to effectively support the discipline of psychological science as the opportunities for change and improvement present themselves. The journey begins…