Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode 150: Can you afford to get an Assistant Psychologist job in the NHS?

In this episode of the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast, Dr. Marianne Trent is joined by Sam Airey to discuss the pressing issue of affordability for Assistant Psychologists. They dive deep into the financial challenges faced by aspiring psychologists, the impact of low NHS pay scales, and the barriers that make the profession less accessible for many. Sam shares his personal experiences, offering practical advice for those trying to navigate a career in psychology despite financial constraints.

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Guest:

• Sam Airey – An experienced Counsellor with a passion for discussing affordability in the psychology profession.

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Key Takeaways:

• Assistant Psychologist roles are often financially inaccessible, particularly for those from diverse backgrounds or with fewer financial resources.

• NHS pay scales for AP roles are low, which can lead to burnout and create barriers to career progression.

• Financial privilege plays a large role in determining who can afford to stay in the psychology profession, with many having to rely on unpaid volunteer roles to build experience.

• Addressing these issues is key to improving workforce diversity and creating a more inclusive path for aspiring psychologists.

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Highlights:

• (00:00) – Dreaming of becoming an Assistant Psychologist
• (01:06) – Introduction of guest, Sam Airey
• (01:30) – Affordability challenges for Assistant Psychologists
• (02:47) – Current NHS pay scales for AP roles
• (05:23) – Comparing NHS roles with lower-paid jobs
• (06:43) – Impact of low pay on workforce diversity
• (08:36) – Financial barriers to entering psychology
• (09:40) – Burnout and the struggle for career progression
• (12:24) – Impact of pay freezes in the NHS
• (14:12) – Challenges for mature applicants
• (16:40) – Costs associated with training and equipment
• (17:51) – Car ownership requirements for AP roles
• (18:45) – Reflecting on privilege and staying in the profession
• (19:37) – Volunteer work and its financial implications
• (22:56) – Sam’s final thoughts and closing remarks

Links:

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Dreaming of becoming an assistant psychologist, but worried about making ends meet, you're not alone. Many aspiring psychologists face the tough reality of low pay, high living costs and the pressure to gain experience at any cost. In today's episode, we dive into the financial challenges of assistant psychologist roles, explore the hidden costs you might not have considered and discuss whether what is often considered a crucial or important career step is really accessible to everyone. If you are wondering how to balance your passion with your paycheck, then my chat with our guest today, Sam, is going to be for you. Hope you find it so useful. Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. Welcome along to one of my very special episodes, which is an assistant psychologist series. Without any further ado, let's dive right in and see just how affordable it is or isn't to be an assistant psychologist in the modern NHS. I'll catch you on the other side. Hi Just want to welcome along to the podcast today, Samantha Airey, who is a qualified counsellor. Hi, Sam. Hi.

Nice to see you.

Yes, indeed. Thank you for reaching out to me to suggest a topic of conversation. I think I'd been discussing on my socials, assistant psychologists and issues around that and thinking about honorary psychologist roles, which had provoked a conversation between us about the affordability of roles like assistant psychologist, hadn't we?

Yeah, I think working as an ap, although it's great experience and it's considered a really normal pathway to the DClin, it comes with its pitfalls because quite a lot of the posts are full-time, and yet they are quite low bandings within the NHS. So where I'm at at the moment, I'm already a band six, so I'd have to take a pay cut to do one of those roles.

Oh gosh. Yes, you really would, wouldn't you? And I know that you are a mother and that you have perhaps more overheads than the people that might be at an earlier stage of their family planning, but also you potentially competing against people who might be 21. And so as our lives progress, we do get more and more bills and regular direct debits. And we were both saying that we've got children that are in year seven of secondary school as well, and they come with their own overheads. He's got his own mobile contract and stuff now my son has. So these outgoings are definitely higher as our lives progress. But it makes me think about when I was an assistant psychologist and actually at that point my Band four role was about £13,000. So the rates have gone up a lot. But should we have a look at the current agenda for change, hourly and yearly rates together?

Yes. So I think AP roles tend to be band four or five. I think it really depends on where you are in the country, but the starting wage for that is around about 1357. That's for a band four. So although some might say that, that's great. I guess it depends on what you've done before, where you might've come from and what your lifestyle has been like. But for me already, nearly 40, I've worked at a band 6 now for the last three or four years is substantial pay cut to do an AP role for me.

Absolutely. And when we think about the living wage, which is about £12 or something like that at the moment, what I'm aware is of that we could be getting not that dissimilar amount of money for a job where essentially no or much lower qualifications are needed with less risk, with less stress, with less multidisciplinary team working, perhaps working in a shop. For example, if you were getting the living minimum wage and then you might even get bonus of staff discount as well. What we are asking of our assistant psychologists is that they are a graduate, they might also have a master's. These are not necessarily the same types of work that you might be expecting from somebody in a national minimum or living wage role.

No, it's a position of responsibility, isn't it? We are required to do regular CPD, we're required to work in a safe way. We are working with people's lives. We're not flipping burgers. And I used to do that. We need that role, but I think that maybe we're not paying people and what they deserve. And also we're seeing that in the NHS trust I work for, we're struggling to get people into the roles that are necessary for the likes of inpatient. That's becoming a problem.

Absolutely. I was talking to my brother the other day and he used to work in Marks and I used to work in boots and my starting wage was £2.97, and he said, oh, mine was more than that. Mine was about £4.50 even in those days, they always paid better it seems, even these days, the idea that I could be working in that role that I really loved and had a great time in getting paid a very similar wage to that of an assistant psychologist is slightly mind boggling.

Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? And in those moments when you're feeling burnt out, overwhelmed by the role and the person in front of you, should we be working in a shop instead? It makes you wonder, doesn't it?

It really does. Why am I doing this? Why am I putting myself through this? And I think especially when we're looking at roots into professionally qualified psychologists where there's no guaranteed pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it can make us question why we're doing it. But do we know what the average rent is at the moment in the UK in terms of affordability?

Well, national statistics for England, I mean Scotland and Wales might be slightly different, but it says the average rent is £1,276. But if we look at the take home for Band four, for example, monthly, it's £1,885. So you've not got much wiggle room there for all your other bills. And that doesn't even include things like pension deductions.

Really, when we're looking at trying to diversify our workforce and have it better represent the people in our country and the people that we serve, we would want a cross section of abilities, a cross section of age range of ethnic diverse factors. But really we are firmly putting the ball in the court of people who can afford to live on very low rent, perhaps even no rent situations by staying in their parents' homes.

Absolutely. It does feel like the majority of applicants in their twenties. In fact, I looked on the alternative handbook for this year. There's only around 6% that are 35 plus and over, so it speaks volumes. I found that quite surprising actually, even that I have to put it in my application that I'm a mature applicant. It just feels crazy when I thought ad clean was supposed to be something that you aimed for after working in mental health for a while and building up experience and knowledge and taking that onto the DClin. It sounds like people are just going from university into that now.

Absolutely. But obviously in terms of the way that applications are screened, your personal data wouldn't be looked at, that would be held separately. But of course it doesn't take an expert to look at the years you did your GCSEs for example, or the years you did your A Levels to be able to work out a candidate's age. And even the range of different jobs and different relevant or non-relevant clinical experiences does make it quite easy to kind of roughly work out what an applicant's age would be. And of course, this goes beyond the pay right now because many people are thinking of assistant psychologists roles as being almost a gold standard into getting the kind of experiences, the kind of supervision, the kind of reflection, the kind of opportunities that do make it more likely that you can progress into a qualified psychologist route. So whilst you might be disadvantaging people now because they can't afford to work as an assistant, we might in essence be capping their later earnings. If they can't then progress into professional qualified roles,

It can feel like we are stuck. I know that we get increments on the bandings now, but it feels like I'm stuck here. This is my place now as a counsellor. I'm in a solid band six role and I can't go anywhere unless I want to do management. If the DClin's not open to me, part of our wellbeing at work is to feel like we've got somewhere to go, somewhere to grow professionally. So it's super important, I think, and something that is kind of mixed within the talking therapies or psychological professions, every unit of the NHS.

But it's such an important point, Sam, because actually what we know from looking at Maslow's hierarchy is that we need to think that we can keep moving forwards and keep self-actualizing and looking at Dr. Claire Plum Lee's special series over the summer Burnout Bites. If we don't feel like we're getting that, then we actually whisk boring out and burning out because we are kind of feeling stuck and stagnant and it's all a bit futile.

Yeah, absolutely. I don't think these factors are really fully considered within some of the teams annual reviews and questionnaire that are routinely sent out to staff consider this, but in reality is much done about it.

And when you get onto a professional paid psychology training role, I remember going from Band four to Band six and essentially feeling a bit like I'd won the lottery. Whereas what I know that the trusts kind of insist on these days is that if you're starting a new role is that you start at the bottom of the increment for that banding if you're new to that trust. So in essence, you could go from being a band six NHS in a neighbouring trust to then starting your new role as a trainee and be financially worse off.

Absolutely. And when I am up in the Northwest, the next trust along geographically, my job would be a Band seven. So it would be even more of a decrease in pay really for some, I think there needs to be some consideration. We shouldn't be trying to get more psychologists. It's a much needed role, and yet not being able to make it affordable for those staff, the job's already hard enough. We don't need life to be hard to,

And I think this speaks volumes of the general sense of kind of psychology pay in the NHS of general pay across the NHS. This isn't just linked to NHS, but I don't want this to sound like my diamond shoes are too tight. But when I was an 8A in the NHS, it actually was not affordable for me to go to Band 8b because I was part-time. And at that time it would've meant that I was actually worse off because of the way that the pension contributions were calculated. So I'd be potentially doing a service lead job with more stress, with more responsibility for less take home pay, which I just wasn't going to be doing. And I guess if we were looking to increase the pay or the banding for assistant psychologists and entry routes into psychology, we'd need to be thinking about what happened to the qualified routes at Band seven and beyond as well. And this isn't an easy fix, this isn't a quick conversation, but this is just us shedding some light and giving some oxygen to that. And I know that the pay freezes that kind of happened 2008 and beyond have really, really made qualified life and the roots into training and qualified life very much less gratifying.

And obviously with being a counsellor, really the psychology route that I should in theory be going on is the counselling psychology. But that isn't a funded programme, and that's what really highlighted all this to me. I'm priced out of taking that on. And someone online once said to me, don't worry. They hand out deodorants and things and vouchers at uni, and I was just blown away that actually it seems socially acceptable that we should be financially disadvantage in ourself for the greater God of becoming a psychologist mad. Oh gosh,

Don't worry. We're not going to pay you, but here's a free roll on. Enjoy that, carry that round in your bag. At least you won't smell when you are really stressed offering all these services to our clients. That said, I don't want people who are listening to this to feel dissuaded necessarily. If you are a trained counsellor, for example, it's not impossible that you can get a funded trading route to be, for example, a clinical psychologist. There is no guaranteed route into this, there never was. But we need to look at broadening people's experiences, still encouraging them to have opportunities to kind of reflect, to be well supervised, to be thinking about access to different clinical populations and different skills. I know that's a separate conversation, but it also feels like an important one, but I hear what you're saying is it's very much harder when you've got stable, predictable factors and dependence to get what would feel like a more reliable path to something like the clinical Psychology doctorate.

Absolutely. It makes me wonder what the reliable path is. It's so different, isn't it for lots of people. Mines certainly being unconventional with doing the conversion masters to get qualified even to apply. But I think as well, it's kind of making me think that it's broadening my horizons. It's making me think about how I can improve my situation academically, clinically, financially, and now I can do workarounds. I think ultimately it'll make me a stronger clinician, but when you're having those days where it feels not affordable or you feel boxed out, then it's tough, isn't it?

It is. And before I became a mother, I could have tightened my own pest strings and just thought, well, I won't buy new shoes and I'm okay to just keep wearing these trousers to work. But when you are a mother, sometimes you have to obviously buy things like new school shoes every year and new uniforms. But also, you don't always want to be the mother that's saying, no, I can't afford that. And I know that will resonate with you because even in myself as a mother, children want all the time. But when it comes down to need chief, actually they do need something. Or if even the relentless £1's that you've got to take into school for, I don't know, whatever day it is this week, there's not always going to be, it's not a magic porridge pot of money. There's not always going to be that money there. And you are just more strapped for cash when you've got more mouths to feed.

Absolutely. I try to use it as a life lesson, I suppose, for my children to budget and to think about where it's best place to spend money. I think that's a life skill that we don't always learn in schools or I didn't. But yeah, you've obviously always got to keep one eye on the table, the food, what's coming in. And also doing my master's, I needed to buy a laptop and now that's pretty much out of a date, so I do get on the doctor, I'll need another one. There's always something that's competing with day-to-Day finances. And I think if I was in my twenties and I still lived at home, that'd be all right. I probably would make that work. But now you've got to spend a bit more time thinking about it.

Absolutely. To my knowledge, no doctorate course gives their new trainees a laptop. Whereas in Converse, when my nephew started a media course at his university, he was given a MacBook, or it's even a Mac, I dunno, some kind of expensive tech, but you do not get that even though it's going to be an essential criteria of your job, you don't get given that yet. If you are being employed as a Band Seven, you would be getting probably a laptop that you can use to take home and work from home or work remotely at different sites. Whereas to my knowledge, that isn't routinely done in doctoral training courses.

No, I don't know much about that, but I can assume not. But even bringing it back to the AP roles, I've just interviewed for one, and part of the criteria was to have a car. So for me and my family, we need two cars for that very kind of predicament that just getting in and around the northwest. But if I didn't have that second car, like many families, what would I have done? Again, I'm priced out Anna over applying for that role.

Absolutely, and even the cost of a car these days, especially if you are in your early twenties, that is outlandishly expensive. And of course for the trainee psychology, doctorate in clinical psychology, it's a prerequisite that you have a driving licence and access to a vehicle, and that is a whole nother ethical conversation. But it certainly continues this entitled affordability discussion too.

When I did the application for the first time last year, it really got me to think about my social graces and my privileges, and although I'm more aware, I kind of think being in this industry, it's feeding the privilege. I dunno if that's the right way of putting it, but we almost have to stay privileged to stay in this line of work,

And there's only so much reflection that we can do. The maths is not mathing, as they say in the states, which is one of my all time favourite sayings. I have to say, the maths is not mathing. You can't suddenly reflect differently on it and have more money in your past only so many ways you can tighten your belt to be able to stay within this profession. And I know that someone who's perhaps getting onto a doctoral training route that might have had two, maybe three assistant psychologist roles at Band 4 may be tipping into Band 5, but in order to get the relevant experience roles, perhaps when they were 21, they did some access routes, which would've been probably less than Band four. So you might be looking at five or six years of band three, band four band five work before you can progress to a Band six role and beyond.

Yeah, and that's not even taken into consideration the kind of volunteering work that we might have to do or want to do, but I can't volunteer anymore. I just don't have the time or the spare cash to allow me to do that. But there have been times where I've gone to a volunteering position and paid for childcare to do that in order to have it on my CB in order to gain enough experience to be able to apply for AP roles or the DClin.

Gosh, that isn't an interesting moral debate that actually someone in a volunteer role is actually paying to be there because of the overheads they have to allow their presence. Oh, that is so big,

And I love the idea of volunteering. I'm really passionate about it. I believe that we should all try to do something no matter what it is that we are into to give back. But like I say, right now, I'm not able to do that. But even in terms of my counselling career, there's an expectation that you'll do hours for free to build up the amount that you have to do to qualify. I don't think that's standalone for counselling either. I think you have to do a certain amount of hours for CBT therapists. Again, it just feeds into this idea of I think we're undervalued and I think the way that we care so much and the people that are doing these roles we're kind of taken advantage of. We want to do it so no one really stands up to say, actually, you need more money or you need more pay or recognition.

Absolutely. They know that they've got us over a barrel, so to speak, because we do care and we are moved by the distress of others, and so we are more likely to be able to, well, to keep tolerating bad treatment. I don't think this podcast episode is going to be, it's not going to change anything, and that's kind of a sad admission, but it will at least have people hopefully become more aware of the ethical dilemmas, not just of the honorary roles, which of course was a separate podcast episode, but there's actually also ethical dilemmas and quandaries in paid work as entry roots into psychology.

Yeah, I think it's everywhere, isn't it? In not parts of the industry. I think ultimately you just have to decide what you are willing to accept and what workarounds you can decide upon for you and your family and what's best for you, and run with that despite sometimes I'll have a great month's financially, sometimes it'll be a little bit more tough, but that's the same for everyone, isn't it? And we just have to cut our cloth accordingly.

Yes, indeed. Well, I hope that your role as a qualified counsellor is going really well for you, and I'm excited to see where you get, I'd love to know the outcome of your assistant psychologist interview once you hear back from them. Thank you so much for opening up this conversation and encouraging not just myself, but our watchers on YouTube and our listeners, wherever people get their podcasts on this really important consideration.

Are you welcome? I think it's important to talk about money. We don't talk about it enough. It's one of those to bes, isn't it? But it's part of the journey into the deli.

Okay. Just before we finish some, is there anything that we've not spoken about that you think might be useful for our viewers to consider?

I think it's important to consider that our journey starts from when we start university. I was first generation in my family to go to university, and my mum, rightly or wrongly just said, do something that you enjoy, do art. And so I did. But then when I started to grow as a person and realise what I wanted to do and how I wanted to work in mental health financially, I couldn't do another undergrad. And then it wasn't until years later that I realised I could get another pot of money to do a master's and do a conversion. But all of this has impacted on my journey to the DClin financially. I just think we kind of forget that some of our financial stories starts years before where we are now.

It really does. And actually in terms of what we think about as money, trauma, perhaps we are carrying stuff from future generations as well for kind of what we could or should be doing, what we could or should be earning, and whether people like us should be at university even. Really, really important. Thank you so much for your time, Sam. Thank you. Thank you so much to my guest today. Sam, I hope you found this to be an interesting and insightful conversation. What do you think? Let me know in the comment, please do like, subscribe, share with your friends. If you're listening on Apple Podcast, please do rate and review the show, Spotify. You can rate, and I would love your feedback. Come and connect with me on socials where I am, Dr. Marianne Trent, everywhere. Let me know. I care about what you care about.

So let me know what you think. If you would welcome some more support and guidance in thinking about your reflection and your career development, please do check out the Aspiring Psychologist Collective book and the Clinical Psychologist Collective book. If you would like to come along to the Aspiring Psychologist Community, which is my free Facebook group and is the exclusive home of Marianne's Motivation and Mindset sessions. Please do so. You'd be so welcome. And if it's your time and your ready for the next step. There's the Aspiring Psychologist membership, which you can join from just £30 a month with no minimum term. And when you do that, you get access to all of the replay recordings since the launch of the membership. So it is incredible value if you're looking to become a psychologist,

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