Senior Educational Psychologist

Paula is an experienced practitioner with special interests in the areas of social, emotional and mental health needs, healthy relationships and trauma informed practice. Paula qualified as an educational psychologist from the University of Manchester in 2005. Before joining the Catalyst team in 2015, having worked for 10 years delivering core and traded services as a link psychologist to number of settings in the Rochdale area, including working with preschool providers, primary and secondary schools and specialist provisions for young people with social, emotional and behavioural needs at primary and secondary levels, and specialist settings for high school pupils with complex learning needs.

As a senior psychologist Paula jointly manages and co-ordinates the assistant psychology programme, co-ordinates the response to SEMH and provides supervision for assistant, trainee and educational psychologists in the team. She also delivers therapeutic interventions including EFT and Healing Together programmes for anxiety, anger and domestic abuse. Paula is committed to contributing to the reduction of domestic abuse at the individual and community levels. She has worked to develop healthy relationships screening tools and an enhanced relationships and wellbeing programs, including Talking Helps, How2relate and the Young Person’s Resiliency Toolkit. She has delivered training and workshops on healthy relationships across primary and secondary settings, charities, teacher training and national and international conferences.