Quality Assurance in an Educational Psychology Service

Abstract

The primary aim of this review of evaluation studies is to analyse what strategies a team of educational psychologists can use to assure the quality of their service to the public. The review covers methods of record keeping, strategies of evaluation and methods of data collection. The article ends by discussing the implications of this experience of service evaluation for the new approaches to quality assurance that are now being imposed on educational psychologists, approaches such as contract monitoring, audit and inspection. It is argued that the quality assurance process itself has to be costeffective. Previous reviews of this subject have focused on the North American literature. A secondary aim of this article is to introduce readers to developments reported in the UK.