Each course has a clinical director and a group of clinical tutors. They support and coordinate the placement aspect of training, including placement sourcing and allocation and delivering training to supervisors who offer placements. Below are the details of the clinical tutor teams on each course: 

RHUL: 

• Clinical Director: Kate Theodore 

• Deputy Clinical Director: Michelle Wilson 

• Clinical tutors: Toby Newson, Anna Crabtree, Anna Millen, and Kira Delgado 

UEL: 

• Programme Director Clinical: Federica Alberton 

• Deputy Clinical Director: Matthew Boardman 

• Clinical Tutors: Zheng Zhou, Nomsa Wayland, Sophie September, Oscar Taylor, Hannah Eades 

UCL:  

• Clinical Director: Jason Crabtree 
• Clinical Tutors: Kat Alcock, Alex Fowke, Mirko Esposito, Anna Churcher-Clarke, Vanessa Buckley, Vickie Roberts, Jarrod Cabourne, Janice Williams, and Zoë Tweedale 

All three courses have their own dedicated placement administration email box, allowing for all placement queries to come in and be addressed by relevant clinical tutors on the course. The contacts are: 

• RHUL: dclinpsy-placements@rhul.ac.uk  

• UEL: clinpsyplacements@uel.ac.uk  

• UCL: placements-admin@ucl.ac.uk  

For each academic year, across the three courses and across all three year groups, there are approximately 600 trainees to allocate to placements for every 6-month placement period. This is a significant task for our clinical tutors as they work to match the needs of trainees (both competency wise, and personal circumstances e.g., home location, additional needs, interests) with the placements offered by supervisors for that allocation round. We need to ensure that each trainee’s path through the course allows them to meet BPS accreditation criteria and that they qualify as good generic clinical psychologists. It is important to note that we usually have about 20% of our placement allocations fall through for each round of allocations. For this reason, it is important that we have all available placements in the region on our lists, to give us a range of options to meet the hugely varied needs of trainees and the substantial number of fall-throughs we get. 

All three North Thames courses run a competency-based model of training. This contrasts with the “core placements plus 3rd year elective placement” model that other DClinPsy courses run. This allows us to make use of the rich and varied placements in the region to help trainees meet core competencies. In addition, there is also a practical issue that it resolves, in that we do not have enough learning disabilities and older adult specific placements to allow all trainees in the region to have such a placement whilst on training. Instead, they would seek opportunities to meet their core competencies across the range of services that they would be working in during their three years on the course. We do absolutely try to match trainee interests into placement allocation wherever possible, but core competency requirements are the central priority in the first instance. Placements for trainees can be either 6 months or one year in duration depending on the stage of training and the needs of the trainee. Placement start and end dates are in line with the academic year. The first 6-month block starts in late September / October and the second in late March / April:  

• First year trainees go on placements to help them gain competencies in adult mental health. Placements can be in AMH services (e.g., IAPT, CMHT, EIS, acute inpatient etc.), Health services (e.g., women’s health, long COVID etc.) or Forensic services. Almost all first-year placements are yearlong, though in rare instances, trainees may be on 2 x 6-month placements in the first year. Please note, many of our first-year trainees come with substantial pre-training clinical experience (e.g., some already have a therapy qualification such as CBT therapists) and do well working with complex presentations. If you currently only offer / would only offer your placement to third year trainees, do consider if you would take a first-year trainee if they had certain prior experience. This may increase our ability to allocate to your placement and would usually allow for a yearlong allocation in your service. You can detail this information in your placement information submission – see in a later FAQ on how to add your placement information to our lists. 

• Second year trainees go on placements to help them gain further core competencies not yet met on their training. To allow them the most opportunity to meet as many of these core competencies as possible, they will always have 2 x 6-month placements. One of these placements will be with children and families (e.g., generic CAMHS, adolescent services, paediatrics etc.). The other 6-month placement will help to address gaps in their core competencies and so may be in older adult services, adult learning disability services, neuropsychology services, physical health services, or forensic services. 

• Third year trainees go on placements that allow them the opportunity to meet any outstanding core competencies, alongside any areas of interest. The placements will build on skills developed in previous placements and broaden their experience. By nature, they may be more challenging than placements at earlier stages of training. Depending on what core competencies trainees have outstanding, they may need to have 2 x 6-month placements. A smaller proportion of trainees can have yearlong placements. This is however not the norm as most trainees will have some outstanding core competencies which may be in contrast to any areas of interest they have e.g., if a trainee was keen for a yearlong child and families placement, but they had remaining older adult competencies to meet, this would not be possible in a child and families placement and we would need to place them in 2 x 6-month placements to ensure they had met the core competencies. Supervisors who only offer yearlong placements for third years should therefore bear in mind that if their placement is limited in opportunities to meet a range of core competencies within the context of the specific work offered in their placement, it may be more difficult for allocators to place trainees with them. 

The BPS accreditation criteria for DClinPsy courses sets out a series of core competencies that trainees must meet by the end of their training. For example, you can look at RHUL competency standards document here which summarises what these core competencies are. It is very helpful if you can support trainees to look for opportunities to meet core competencies on your placement, even if they are not directly available in your service. For example, if a trainee was on placement in an IAPT service, could you facilitate the trainee linking in with a local early intervention for psychosis service to join some assessments for exposure to psychosis presentations, which could then form part of other experience in psychosis across the three years of training. Indeed, another option is offering split placements – this is covered below in one of the other FAQs.  

As the three DClinPsy courses commissioned for the North Thames region, trainees from RHUL, UEL and UCL have priority for all trainee clinical psychology placements available in the North Thames region (i.e., all services within the M25 and north of the Thames River), this includes both statutory and non-statutory organisations. There is a national agreement between all DClinPsy programmes in the country for out of area placements. In line with the agreement, if a trainee from a course outside of our region (i.e., any trainees from courses other than RHUL, UEL and UCL) would like to use a placement slot within our region, this needs to be negotiated and agreed via the three North Thames courses, and not directly with supervisors / placements. As such, if you are contacted by courses or trainees from courses other than RHUL / UEL / UCL about placements in your service, please do direct them to us and we can liaise with them about it and plan for them to be allocated to any unused placements. We do this after our allocation meetings have taken place to ensure that RHUL, UEL and UCL trainees have all been allocated before any out of area allocations are agreed and made. If you have any questions about this, please do contact RHUL, UEL and UCL directly to discuss further. 

As you can imagine, there are a huge number of supervisors, in a range of different services, in the North Thames region. To help share the administrative load of gathering and managing all these details, the three courses have several different placement lists that are held by each course. Each list has a “list holder” that is the point of contact for placements of that type. This allows the list holder to get to know supervisors and placement coordinators well, supporting them with any queries or issues related to their placement. Although the placement lists are held by the different courses, trainees from all three courses have equal access to all placements in the region, regardless of which list they sit on. The placement lists are: 

Placement lists held by RHUL: 

• Physical health placements (adult) – any physical health service for adults. If there is a mixture of child and adult work, they would sit on this list 

• Neuropsychology placements – any neuropsychology focused placements e.g., rehab, stroke

• Forensic placements – any forensic service, community, prison, low, medium, high secure

• People with learning disabilities placements (adult) – services for adults with learning disabilities, including Autism assessment services 

Placement lists held by UEL: 

• Older adult placements – any older adult specific services e.g., memory services, CMHT etc.

• Child 2nd and 3rd year specialist placements – any child placement (for second or third years), including child disability and paediatric placements

Placement lists held by UCL: 

• First year adult mental health placements – adult mental health placements suitable for first years

• Specialist adult placements including leadership only placements – adult specialist placements, clinical academic placements, leadership placements suitable for second or third years. Perinatal placements sit on our specialist list, even if there is some direct work with babies / young children included in the work. Additionally, this list also holds all staff wellbeing services regardless of which Trust they are in.

If you want to add your placement to our lists, please contact the relevant course using the contact details provided further up on this page. You will be asked to complete a survey that captures your placement details. You will fill it in fully once. On subsequent years when we do placement sourcing, your details will be pre-populated on the survey, and you will simply update them. You can be added to a placement list at any point in the year, even if the allocation meetings have already taken place, so do get in contact at any point in time to be added to the list. 

Yes absolutely, though the split in placement needs to be arranged by yourself as supervisor with the other supervisor who will join you on the placement, i.e., as courses we would not be able to source part of the placement for you if you are only able to offer one half of a placement. This option can work well for supervisors that work part time. The below points are helpful to consider when offering split placements:

• You should think carefully about the split of work across the placement.
• Please ensure that the placement bases are not too far apart geographically, as we do allocate trainees in part based on commute length, so keeping them generally close in location helps us with managing commute times for trainees.
• You will need to decide which supervisor will be the “primary” supervisor and will take the lead on placement paperwork and attending the mid and end of placement review meeting (of course both supervisors can attend the meeting, but at least one must be present and able to represent feedback for the whole placement).
• Trainees will need to overlap on one day with each supervisor.

Trainee feedback has been that split placements can work well, though clear communication between both supervisors to understand the spread of work, supervision arrangements and pattern of work are critical to making the placement run smoothly and enhance learning opportunities. If you would like to discuss a possible split placement, contact the course which holds the placement list upon which you believe the placement will sit. 

Before you can offer a placement for a trainee, you need to attend our two-day introductory supervisor workshop. You can find details of the next introductory supervisor workshop on this webpage. Please see a later FAQ below for further information on the full range of supervisor workshops that we offer (which are also detailed on that same webpage). 

Typically, supervisors can start being involved in supervising trainees from one year post qualification. Between one- and two-years post qualification, supervisors will often join with another more experienced supervisor to offer a split placement for a trainee, to support them into supervision of trainees. If, however a supervisor had substantial pre-training experience of supervision to a level equivalent of a trainee clinical psychologist e.g., they were a qualified CBT therapist and had offered clinical supervision, they would be in a position to offer sole supervision of a trainee from the point of qualification from the DClinPsy. From two years post qualification, supervisors can offer placements as a sole supervisor. All supervisors should be given supervision of their supervision, and their workload should be adjusted to accommodate the time required to supervise trainees. When thinking about this, the service can acknowledge the work that trainees would pick up in the service and how this counteracts the time supervisors would “lose” by reducing their clinical caseload in order to offer supervision.  

Most of our supervisors are qualified clinical psychologists. We do however welcome other psychological professionals offering placements; we appreciate the rich and specific expertise they bring which our trainees greatly value e.g., in specific therapeutic approaches. For clinicians that are not clinical psychologists, they need to have a core professional training and accrediting body that they are accountable to. We would refer to them as “practice supervisors” whilst the co-ordinator of the placement, a clinical psychologist, oversees the placement. Please see the accreditation criteria here for more information (bottom of page 28). In practice for these placements, having some access to / contact with clinical psychologists across the placement for some opportunities for trainees to reflect on their professional identity (this could be a once a month meeting for example / joint working on one or two cases with a clinical psychologist) would be recommended and helpful for trainees. This may allow services to expand placement capacity where one clinical psychologist could coordinate several placements with other psychological professionals, whilst offering monthly group meetings with trainees allocated to the placements for example. This approach can also greatly support our BABCP CBT and Systemic pathways that the courses are developing, allowing for the clinical practice needed from accredited supervisors in the region who may not be clinical psychologists.

Within an academic year, there are some key timepoints for placement sourcing and allocation: 

Placement sourcing: 

Courses get in touch directly with all supervisors that they have on their placement lists in early April each year to ask them how many placements they will be able to offer for the next academic year. For example, in April 2024 we would have contacted supervisors to ask them how many placements they were offering for academic year 2024-2025 (placements starting in Sept/Oct 2024 and Mar/Apr 2025). We get in touch with all the supervisors that we already have on our placement lists. We send them a personalized link that has their placement details pre-populated on it and they simply update the information for us. Any new supervisor completes a blank survey for us to capture their placement information. Please note, each placement list has a different survey for capturing placement details. Please do get in touch with the relevant course if you want to add your placement to our lists. We need to have updated information from supervisors submitted to us by the start of June as that is when allocators start the “pre-allocation process” ahead of our summer allocation meetings (see below).

We then get in touch with supervisors again in November time to reconfirm their placement offer for the following Mar/Apr placement period – this allows us to be sure supervisors are still able to take trainees already allocated to them for Mar/Apr, and that any unallocated slots are still available. We do this to try help limit placement fall throughs following our February allocation meetings. Supervisors are sent an email which details what they had said they could offer for the Mar/Apr placement period and any trainees already allocated to them, to which they simply need to email reply and confirm if the information is accurate or not. We need supervisors to confirm the information by early January time. 

Placement allocation: 

Most placement allocations happen in July time each year (our summer allocations meetings), where we plan placement allocations for the next academic year. Just ahead of these summer allocation meetings, in June time, the clinical tutors on the three courses gather information from trainees about the competencies they have already met, those which are outstanding and information about their personal circumstances (e.g., home postcode, any additional needs such as caring responsibilities, their hopes and interests for placements). They then use this information alongside that provided by supervisors about what placements they are offering, and match trainees to appropriate placements. We use our knowledge of our trainees alongside the details you provide us about your placement to make best fit allocations. As such, please do ensure that you include full details about your placement in your entry, including any important information that allocators should hold in mind when allocating trainees (e.g., is the placement best suited to a trainee with particular skills or prior experience). The clearer you are with us in your placement entry, the better we can be at matching trainees to your placements. The courses make “pre-allocations” to the placement lists, and then the allocators for each year group come together in three separate meetings (one for each year group) to discuss which placements each course will use for their trainees for the next academic year. We share placements equally and fairly across the three courses. Following on from the allocation meetings, we then contact supervisors. Please see below information about the three allocation meetings and our steps post the meetings: 

• First year allocations take place once a year in July. This is to plan placements for the incoming first year trainees due to start the course in the September of the same year. The placements will start in the October. As noted above they are almost aways yearlong placements. 

• Second year allocations take place twice a year, where we allocate only 6 months at a time. One meeting happens in July, to plan the first 6-month placement for the incoming second years (placements will start in late September / early October). The second allocation meeting happens in early February to plan the second 6-month placement of the second year (placements will start in late March / early April) 

• Third year allocations  largely take place once a year in July. This is to plan placements for the incoming third years for the whole of their final year - some trainees will have 2 x 6-month placements, some will have yearlong placements, this will depend on their core competency requirements outstanding for the third year as well as their interests. Third year placements will start in late September / early October for the first 6-month block and late March / early April for the second 6-month block. We occasionally need to allocate a trainee’s second 6-month block in a February allocation meeting, but for the most part we allocate their whole third year placements in the July meeting. 

Supervisors who have been allocated a trainee in one of the meetings will hear about allocation(s) to their placement about 2 – 3 weeks after our allocation meetings. For supervisors where we have unfortunately not been able to make an allocation to your placement, we will aim to let you know about 6-8 weeks after the allocation meeting (we leave a longer gap as there are times when we may need to make some changes to allocation made in the meeting e.g., due to placement fall throughs / errors in initial allocations, and therefore may still be able to allocate to your placement). After we have allocated all our North Thames trainees, we will liaise with out of region courses (mainly IoPPN, Surrey, Hertfordshire and Essex) to consider which placements we can release to them. We are very keen for supervisors to have trainees allocated to their placements, so if we do not require a placement slot, rest assured we will make these available to other courses. A reminder, second years and some third years will have their Mar/Apr placement slot allocation made in the February allocation meeting, so if you accept either of these year groups, and are not allocated a trainee in the July meeting, it is highly likely you will be allocated a trainee in the February meeting. As such, please do not release your placement slots (e.g., to counselling psychology trainees) before liaising with us directly to discuss first, as clinical psychology trainees should be prioritised for the placements in the first instance. 

NHS England (NHSE, the body that funds clinical psychology training) provides a placement tariff to the supervisors employing Trust / organisation for every trainee that goes to that placement. NHSE sets out in their guidance what and how the placement tariff should be used to enable and enhance placement experiences. You can see full details about the placement tariff here, however we summarise for you below what and how it should be used as per the NHSE guidance:

• Corporate functions:
  • HR and recruitment for placement coordinators and practice educators,
  • Financial management of clinical placement activities

• Staff Development:

  • CPD for placement supervisors to enhance placement experiences

• Management of Trainees:

  • Attendance monitoring for clinical placements

• Quality and Standards:

  • Placement quality standards, including HCPC/BPS compliance

• Registry Services:

  • Enrolment, documentation of progress, and student registry services

• IT Services:

  • Clinical IT services (e.g., patient administration systems, access to placement-provided IT resources)

• Student Services:

  • Workplace adjustments for placement activities

• Teaching and Learning:

  • Supervision for clinical placement activities that meets BPS and HCPC standards and guidelines

  • Provision of clinical placements across specialties

• Space and Facilities:

  • Clinical facilities and equipment for placement (e.g., clinic rooms, PPE, assessment tools)

  • Maintenance of clinical and administrative placement spaces

  • Administrative support for placement-related activities (e.g., appointment scheduling)

• Fitness to Practise:

  • Contributions to fitness-to-practise procedures

It is important that when you provide your placement information to us, you accurately record your employing Trust / organisation, as this is where the placement tariff payments will be made to. Do discuss with your placement coordinator / senior psychologists in your service / organisation about how the tariff will be collected and used in your organisation.    

The three North Thames courses offer a range of different supervisor workshops and shorter discussion spaces that are all free to supervisors in the North Thames region who offer placements for trainee clinical psychologists, i.e., you must be actively offering a placement to be able to attend any of the workshops. You can find full details of the different workshops here.

Please note, it is a requirement in the BPS accreditation criteria that all supervisors attend at least one supervisor workshop every 5 years. As such, please do look at the available sessions that we have and book onto one should you be reaching 5 years since your last attended one. 

We are currently in the process of collating contacts from each Trust in the region for the person best placed to act as a placement link with the courses. We are thinking of this as being a slightly different role to the placement coordinator role, drawing on a model from South London courses where Trusts have someone internally who acts as a bridge between courses and placement coordinators and supervisors, facilitating a more joined up approach to placement sourcing and coordination. This model seems to offer benefits to both trusts and courses. If you are unaware of who the Trust link person is in your Trust, please do liaise with your senior psychologists / Trust psychology lead who can put you in touch with them to help facilitate your placements. Below we list some possible activities that a placement link person may undertake: 

• Supporting source placements in advance of placement planning, identifying new supervisors 

• Cross check who is working in psychology to check if people supervising and if not why not. 

• Sharing links to supervisors workshops and other course related updates 

• Tracking of those who are moving to a position of supervising i.e. newly qualified. 

• Exploring where new placements can take place or split placements 

• Trainees requirement of reasonable adjustments – also linking with Trust regarding what is available. E.g. IT and staff support – supporting supervisors in ensuring reasonable adjustments are implemented on placement.  

• Ensure laptops and IT for all trainees are available for all trainees. 

• IT links. More efficient – clinical systems training team, security so supervisors don’t have to manage individually. 

• Supporting trainees of racialised background. 

• Support to supervisors within the trust. 

• Pathway for feedback to training courses. 

• Welcome meetings to the trust for 1st/2nd/3rd year trainees. 

• Responsible for adding to ancillary/honorary staffing list (i.e. informing the trust people are on trust HR records). 

• Working more closely with the course and supporting this.