Higher degree resign: AI summarises the submissions

The Psychology board of Australia has just released their summary of feedback from the public consultation into the redesign of psychology training.

I was struck by on sentence on page 3 “…almost half of all respondents express at least some level of support for the proposed model”. Being an old cognitive therapist, I recognise that as a glass half full way of saying “More than half of respondents found nothing to support in the new model”.

So with this in mind, I decided I would need to make some time to read the submissions myself. But who has that kind of time, thankfully a good AI agent setup in a well trained agentic harness has exactly that type of time, and so i set it to work, and this morning it gave me the following summary …

When you strip away the Board’s “stakeholders shared diverse perspectives” corporate speak, here is the unvarnished reality of what the profession actually said about the proposed 5-Year Bachelor of Professional Psychology model:

1. The “Magic Supervisor” Problem

The Board’s proposal introduces practical clinical training much earlier (starting in year two of the new 5-year degree). The professional bodies pointed out a glaring flaw: there is already a massive shortage of qualified supervisors.

• The submissions ruthlessly point out that creating a new degree doesn’t magically spawn new supervisors.
• Pushing thousands of 2nd- and 3rd-year undergraduate students into clinical placements threatens to completely overwhelm an already exhausted and under-compensated supervisory workforce.

2. Universities Warn of a Logistical & Financial Nightmare

The higher education submissions (from the Group of Eight and others) didn’t mince words about the reality of implementing this.

• Moving from the current multi-stage model (3-year Bachelor + Honours + Masters/Internship) to a single 5-year direct-entry model completely breaks current university funding structures and Commonwealth Supported Places (CSP) models.
• The universities explicitly warned that transitioning to this new model will require massive, currently non-existent transitional funding to rewrite curriculums, overhaul accreditation standards, and manage the “teach-out” of current students.

3. Fear of a “Watered-Down” Profession

While everyone agrees the current system is too complex, the peak bodies (especially the clinical colleges within the APS) expressed deep concern about academic rigor.

• To cram what used to take 6 years into 5, the Board proposed cutting out “non-psychology” electives (like general science or arts subjects).
• The associations warned this could create a narrow, “tick-box” professional who lacks the broader scientific and critical thinking foundation necessary for complex clinical reasoning.

4. Unpaid Placements & The Equity Illusion

The Board championed the new model as a win for “equity and access.” The unions and student submissions shot back hard on this point.

• A 5-year degree heavily reliant on practical placements usually means unpaid placements.
• Submissions highlighted that forcing students to do hundreds of hours of unpaid clinical work effectively locks lower-socioeconomic students out of the profession, worsening the exact equity problem the Board claims to be solving.

End AI summary, and now back to my editorial.

I would disagree briefly with one of the above.

Firstly there is no massive supervisor shortage, almost a third of us are supervisors. What there is is a shortage of money to pay supervisors appropriately for the work they do, so they vote with their feet and do something else with their time.

There remain significant unanswered questions.

• Will the reduced pathway to becoming a generally registered psychologist lead to paycuts for psychology? An extra year of HECS debt for a lower level of pay seems like a good deal for the government, a lousy deal for the student
• Will this take the current two tier problem that is largely limited to Medicare and entrench it sector wide? If so, is that a bug or a feature ?
• How will endorsement after uni actually work? One of the beauties of the registrar program is the opportunity to take al of that learning and apply it to a more complex case load. Will people come out as endorsed psychologists having just done longer placements in the university clinics and “approved training providers”
• With the loss of the National Psychology Exam, how will standards be assured as consistent? There is certainly incentive in this propsal for bad faith actors to spool up “psychologist mill” programs
• Is the psychology assistant role dead? This was probably the most controversial part of the whole package, and was almost universally criticised. The wording in the summary leaves a lot of wiggle room to bring it back later.

My broader point in all of this is simply, this is not how good policy reform works.

Government is a two speed system; the speed of bureaucracy, and the speed of politics.

Bureaucracy is slow and boring, it involves stakeholder meetings, green papers, endless redesign, white papers and eventual law. But its inefficiency is its strength. The mandarins usually get it right

Politics is fast, sloppy and chaotic. Agendas are changed to suit news cycles. It is agile and acutely tuned to the needs of the moment. Its also the way you produce a pink batt scheme, and in fact most of the more egregious government screw ups of the past few decades