Did the Psychology Board forget 2022, or are they hoping we did?

If you want to understand the sense of whiplash in Australian psychology, you don’t need to read the 88 submissions currently tearing apart the 2026 training redesign. You just need to read the Psychology Board’s own announcements from a few years ago.

In 2019 the Board announced it would retire the 4+2 internship, the undergraduate-heavy pathway into the profession, and in 2022 it closed that pathway to new interns. The direction was clear: the future of psychology training was postgraduate.

Fast forward to today. The Board has done a spectacular 180-degree pivot, proposing a five-year undergraduate degree. No Master’s required.

1. The public safety argument

Moving away from the undergraduate pathway was framed as the responsible way to train psychologists. Today, the Board is suggesting a completely untested model of training based largely on undergraduate-level experience, and a placement model with scant details.

2. The supervision burden argument

The Board said the 4+2 carried too high a regulatory and administrative burden for employers, supervisors and interns. Today it proposes hundreds of hours of embedded undergraduate placements, dumping a massive new wave of trainees squarely onto an already exhausted, unpaid supervisory workforce.

3. The international standards argument

A postgraduate standard put Australia in step with comparable countries. By downgrading entry back to an undergraduate level, the Board risks isolating Australian psychologists from every major international jurisdiction.

The bottom line: you can’t have it both ways

A few years ago the Board moved away from undergraduate-heavy training. Now it is proposing a model that recreates the very conditions it moved away from.

The Board has backed itself into a logical corner, and needs to answer a simple question: were the arguments for leaving the old pathway wrong, or is the 2026 proposal unsafe?