Press Release from the British Psychological Society
The Joint Committee for Psychology in Higher Education (JCPHE) has strongly criticised the proposal by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) to downgrade the funding of undergraduate psychology courses in a response, submitted on Friday 4 December, to the SFC Consultation on ‘Teaching Funding Subject Price Groups for Higher Education Institutions’.
The JCPHE represents The British Psychological Society, Association of Heads of Psychology Departments and the Experimental Psychology Society.
The proposal states that science subjects could be split in two price groups, ‘B’ and ‘C’, with psychology allocated to the ‘C’ group along with non-laboratory-based subjects such as mathematics and education.
Professor William Marslen-Wilson, Chair of JCPHE said "The proposal to reduce the funding of psychology courses will be strongly contested by the academic community. This will seriously undermine the status of psychology as a scientific discipline. Under these proposals adequate resources would no longer be available to teach psychology as a laboratory based subject."
The concerns are:
• Inconsistency with Higher Education Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE) classification of psychology for the new Research Excellence Framework (REF), where the discipline sits squarely within the biological-medical sciences spectrum. This should also be reflected in how the teaching of the discipline is funded.
• Current national accreditation of undergraduate psychology courses (organised by the British Psychological Society) requires that at least 30% of each year is taken up with practical laboratory work, including a stand alone research project in the final year.
• The Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) methodology that will be adopted is flawed in that it relies on the historical rather than the appropriate or intended level of funding. It penalises expanding subjects like psychology, and leads to over-funding of disciplines that are contracting and losing student numbers.
‘The current SFC Subject Price Group proposals for psychology fail to reflect its growing importance and status as a scientific discipline, and do not take into account the core role of laboratory-based teaching in psychology as a nationally accredited discipline.
‘It is essential to the scientific basis of the discipline that UK universities are able to treat and support psychology as a laboratory discipline, in line with the practice of other major competitor countries.
For more information visit www.bps.org.uk