Does Psychology Have a Qualification Problem In The UK? A Clinical Psychology Podcast Episode.
- Connor Whiteley
- 5 hours ago
- 12 min read
In this reflective clinical psychology podcast episode, you’ll hear my reflections on the lack of qualification that psychology degrees actually give you in the United Kingdom, how other career paths allow you to become a qualified mental health professional a lot sooner and why psychology needs to fix this problem. As well as how it could achieve this. If you enjoy learning about clinical psychology, careers in psychology and psychotherapy then this will be a brilliant episode for you.
Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Psychology Worlds Magazine. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
A Reminder That I Love Psychology and Being A Psychology Graduate
Before I start this podcast episode that is very reflective of clinical psychology, I want to take a moment to remind you all that I flat out love psychology. As I write this section, I can’t stop smiling because to me, psychology is amazing, it’s so much fun and it has so much power to transform lives for the better.
Studying at university for my psychology degrees were some of the best years of my life. Not only because they allowed me to deepen my understanding and appreciation for the profession I love, but also because they allowed me to heal. In other podcast episodes and books, I’ve discussed how my psychology background has given me the awareness to recover from my trauma, my rape, my anorexia and everything that I have had to fight through just to survive.
And I am so grateful that I studied psychology because without the awareness, the knowledge and the experience that psychology has given me, I never would have been able to recover from these types of trauma as I have.
I would probably have died by suicide a long time ago without my psychology degrees.
In that regard, my psychology degrees really have saved my life and studying psychology allows a lot of people to experience this. Whether they are clients in mental health services, someone looking to retrain and find purpose in psychology and more.
In addition, I love psychology because of the amazing connections that I’ve made over the years. whether it’s a brilliant podcast guest, mutual professional connections that I have a vague working relationship with or just my friends and my lecturers. I treasure all of those connections and I was only able to develop them because I studied psychology at university.
Finally, I flat out love psychology because without it, I wouldn’t have my business, I wouldn’t have my podcast and everything that makes me, me wouldn’t be here.
I could reflect on all the reasons why I strongly believe everyone should study psychology, but that isn’t the point of this podcast episode and I’m sure in volume 10 of Beyond The Lectures, I’ll write about it. And in the interest of full disclosure, Beyond The Lectures is what I’m retitling future volumes of my Clinical Psychology Reflections series.
On the whole, as you can see, I love psychology, I wouldn’t change my degrees for the world and this is a reflective podcast episode on the qualification aspects of the profession. Not the subject.
Does Psychology Have a Qualification Problem In The UK?
In the United Kingdom, if you do an undergraduate degree or postgraduate degree in psychology, clinical psychology or any other type of psychology, you are qualified in nothing. You are not a psychologist, you are not a mental health professional, and in the eyes of the job market, you are just as qualified as anyone without a psychology degree.
Okay, maybe the last point is a minor overexaggeration, but it is still true to a large extent.
However, if you do an undergraduate degree in social work, nursing or any other healthcare profession, then you can leave your degree in the UK and become eligible to be a fully licensed practitioner in that field. You can leave your undergraduate degree and become a qualified social worker, nurse, mental health nurse and so on.
Therefore, in this reflection, I’ll be reflecting on the lack of qualification that psychology degrees actually give you in the United Kingdom, how other career paths allow you to become a qualified mental health professional a lot sooner and why psychology needs to fix this problem. As well as how it could achieve this.
What are Licensing Degrees?
In the United Kingdom (and I imagine for the rest of the world), licensing degrees are higher education qualifications that you complete to become fully qualified or at least eligible to register as a qualified professional with the relevant governing body. For example, if you do an accredited nursing degree in the United Kingdom then upon completion you can register with the Nursing and Midwifery Council to be a qualified nurse in whatever area of nursing you choose.
Here is a list of the other licensing degrees available in the United Kingdom:
· Nursing (all fields)
· Midwifery
· Paramedic Science
· Physiotherapy
· Occupational Therapy
· Radiography (Diagnostic/Therapeutic)
· Speech & Language Therapy
· Dietetics
· Podiatry
· Operating Department Practice
· Social Work
· Dentistry (Dentist, Hygienist, Therapist)
· Veterinary Medicine
· Veterinary Nursing
In other words, if you do an accredited degree in one of the above areas in the United Kingdom, you can potentially finish your undergraduate degree as a fully qualified professional.
Moreover, this is important for aspiring mental health professionals, because in the past few days, I’ve been learning a lot about the non-psychology mental health job market in the UK, and to become a mental health practitioner in the NHS, you need to be either a qualified mental health nurse, social worker or practising psychologist.
The route to becoming a psychologist, not including the years of unpaid work experience you need to do, is at least six years or 7 years if you do an MSc. Whereas to become a social worker and mental health nurse, it takes 3 years.
One of my points here is that whilst I have flat out loved my psychology degrees and I wouldn’t change them for the world, if I was advising someone who was passionate about mental health which path to take. I honestly might not recommend psychology because compared to other qualified professions in the UK, it is so, so hard to get a job with a psychology degree.
Because if you’re a psychology graduate, you actually are not qualified in anything.
Nothing at all.
Whereas if you want to work in mental health, you could do a nursing degree, do a specialised undergraduate degree in mental health nursing as well as you could do a social work degree and come out as a qualified professional in three years.
This way you have a lot more jobs available to you because you’re a qualified professional, you can still work in mental health and you can almost be on the big money as soon as you leave university.
Of course, I am not blind to the probable reality that it’s still hard to get a job because there are thousands of other graduates graduating each year, there are always work experience requirements and sometimes it’s about who you know, not what you know.
On the other hand, unlike psychology and clinical psychology, nursing makes practical elements a core part of their degrees. For example, to become a qualified nurse in the UK, you need 800 hours of practical experience and this is already included in your undergraduate degree.
Dear psychology readers, can you imagine how amazing it would be to get 800 hours of clinical psychology experience as a standard part of your degree? I would flat out love that and my employability would be amazing compared to what it is right now.
There are so many mental health jobs available at the moment in the NHS, but because I only studied psychology to Masters level, I don’t have the qualifications to apply for them. Yet if a mental health nurse or a social worker saw these jobs after their undergraduate degree, they would at least have the qualifications as well as licenses to apply for these roles.
To me, it’s insane that I did an MSc in clinical psychology, I lived and breathed clinical psychology and how to help people, but I’m not allowed to become a mental health practitioner. There aren’t even trainee routes into becoming a mental health practitioner.
At least not really.
There are occasionally mental health practitioner training schemes, jobs and opportunities but I haven’t seen any of them for months. Even if they only appear in the last four months of the calendar year, that is nowhere near enough to accommodate the tens of thousands of psychology students that graduate every year.
Furthermore, the United Kingdom complains that there is a mental health crisis, more people than ever before are experiencing mental health difficulties and our mental health services are being stretched to their limits. As well as the NHS admit that there is a national shortage of NHS mental health nurses, which is why at the time of writing they give healthcare professionals a £5,000 a year bursary and a £1,000 specialism bursary if you study mental health nursing to encourage an uptick in the profession.
Excuse me.
You have tens of thousands of psychology graduates each year that are graduating from university wanting to work in mental health. Why don’t you look at them? Train them? Make them trainee mental health practitioners?
Just a thought.
How Could We Solve This Qualification Issue?
If we want to make psychology a subject at university where you can become a qualified professional, then there are some solutions to this crisis. Since right now, doing a psychology degree does not do much to your employability. Especially because a lot of people cannot do the years of unpaid work experience that you need to even remotely get a foot in the door to the clinical psychology profession amongst all the other issues with the psychology job market that myself and other professionals have spoken about before.
Firstly, stratify psychology degrees. I do not believe that we need to restructure psychology degrees entirely. Since even practising psychologists need to understand every single little thing that a psychology undergraduate teaches you from social, cognitive, biological and personality psychology as well as statistics.
That doesn’t need to change.
However, similar how you have some degrees in the United Kingdom that are different, we need to create some more specialist psychology degrees. For example, my undergraduate degree was Psychology with Clinical Psychology and a Placement Year. That is the official title of my degree, so it was not a psychology degree but it was a more specialist degree.
If a university can create a specialist psychology degree, why can’t it create a more practical psychology degree that gives you a qualification at the end?
But Connor, it’s hard for universities to get the partnerships and placement opportunities for students.
I don’t doubt that counterpoint in the slightest and this isn’t just about universities. I understand that I am basically calling for a seismic shift in how the psychology job market works as well as how psychology professionals are qualified, but it can be done.
Nursing shows us that. There are thousands of nursing students in each academic year across the United Kingdom, and somehow each student gets at least 800 hours of experience by the end of their course.
Some of those 800 hours are stimulated experience done by practical teaching. Yet they still get hands-on experience with real patients in real hospitals with real people.
What makes psychology so unique that we can’t do that?
But Connor, not all psychology students want to become mental health professionals.
I completely agree and during my psychology undergraduate, I knew tons of students that couldn’t stand the idea of seeing clients and working in an applied setting. As well as being a practising psychologist isn’t right for everyone. Lots of psychology students don’t want to be a mental health professional.
Students might be passionate about psychology research, social psychology, forensic psychology or any other area of psychology that isn’t related to mental health. Also, there will be plenty of psychology students who want to research mental health without being a practicing professional.
There are two things that I want to add in response to this great point.
Firstly, if a medical doctor wants to research medical diseases or conditions, then they still need to have the same qualifications, including the practical elements, as a practising medical professional. The same goes for if a nurse wanted to focus on nursing studies and the research side of being a nurse, then they would still need the practical element and the nursing qualification that their degree gives them. Therefore, whilst not all psychology students want to become a practising psychologist or a mental health professional, they might benefit from a more practical undergraduate course that gives them a licensed qualification at the end of their course.
It is no different to practicing psychologists having to learn about research methods and statistics during their undergraduate studies, even if they know they have no intention of having a career in research.
Secondly, I would respond to this point by mentioning that this is why stratification of psychology degrees is important. If we create some psychology degrees that allow you to become a qualified mental health practitioner or psychologist upon completion, and allow other degrees to stay as “basic” psychology degrees that don’t allow you to become a qualified professional. Then that is one solution.
Students can apply for the course that gives them what they want.
But Connor, other science courses require you to have experience or a portfolio. Why shouldn’t psychology have the same requirements?
Again, this is a great point. My ex-boyfriend studied biology at university and he can’t become a registered biologist or a qualified scientist because he doesn’t have the experience or the portfolio to register as a scientist. Therefore, you could easily argue that because psychology is a science, we should have to produce a portfolio and reflect on our healthcare experiences to become a fully qualified professional.
But why can’t this experience be apart of our standard degrees?
That is the point that I don’t understand and I’ll tackle more points throughout this reflection that build upon this so-called criticism even more.
However, I strongly believe that we should have some kind of practical element baked into clinical psychology degrees that allows us to become a qualified mental health professional. Especially, as clinical psychology is a science and a healthcare profession.
If a medical doctor, who is a professional in the science of medicine, then why can’t a psychologist, who is a professional in the science of behaviour, be a qualified professional?
I do not understand that.
But Connor, can’t a psychology student harm someone’s mental health if they make a mistake during training?
Of course they can, but so can a trainee nurse or another trainee healthcare professional. If a trainee incorrectly inserts a needle and misses or punctures an artery whilst they take blood, then it causes a lot of blood to squirt out, they could die and it takes that artery out of action in terms of extracting blood.
I learnt that during a blood donation that I went to a few years ago.
Therefore, this means that we are willing to allow trainee nurses and other healthcare professionals to potentially kill, harm or injure a real person. Yet we aren’t willing to allow trainee psychology professionals the same, that’s weird, isn’t it?
Psychology students are trained in behaviour, trained in how mental health conditions work and how therapy works and improve lives. Yet unlike other healthcare professionals, psychology students aren’t allowed to put their knowledge into practise?
Whereas nurses and other healthcare professionals are given needles, blood pressure cuffs and other highly sensitive and important medical information during their training. It’s very high-quality training but I’m failing to see why my Masters’ education was less high-quality than an undergraduate in nursing.
These are fair points.
But Connor, won’t a licensing psychology degree take longer to complete?
Very possibly. Whilst nursing, social work and other licensing degrees in the United Kingdom allow you to complete them and get your 800 hours of experience in 3 years, a licensing psychology degree might take longer. This is especially true when we consider that medical doctors, who are professionals in the science of medicine, go to university for 5 to 7 years.
However, I am approaching this from the angle of I firmly believe psychology students would prefer to be at university for longer, come out as a qualified professional and have a lot more high-paying mental health jobs available to them compared to the current system of doing a psychology undergraduate and postgraduate degree and being qualified in nothing.
Clinical Psychology Conclusion
At the end of this reflection, I am not blind to the immense challenges that implementing my proposed ideas represent. This would require a massive restructure of mental health qualifications, universities forming partnerships with mental health services and it will require involvement from the UK Government, the British Psychological Society, the Health and Care Professions Council and so on.
However, the real point that I am trying to raise here is that it seems really weird to me that I’ve completed an undergraduate degree in psychology, I’ve completed a Masters of Science in clinical psychology and I am not qualified in anything.
I simply have a lot of knowledge, two degrees and a lot of experience in education but I’m not allowed to use any of it in a mental health setting.
Yet if you do nursing, social work or any other licensing profession in the UK, you’re eligible to register and practice using all your knowledge and experience as soon as you graduate.
That doesn’t sit right with me.
What do you think?
I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode.
If you want to learn more, please check out:
Psychology Worlds Magazine. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
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