The new pathway to becoming a psychologist: what the training reform is really about

There’s a major reform under way in Australian psychology training. You’ve probably heard the pitch: a shorter pathway, more practical training, more psychologists sooner. Parts of that are needed.

But something important is missing from the conversation. The real issue isn’t that we lack placements. It’s that we lack placements at the price the current system wants to pay. Once you see that, this looks less like a reform of training and more like a review of what psychologists, and supervision, are worth.

The good parts

The proposal is a five-year professional degree, with practical training earlier and a single streamlined pathway. That part is hard to argue with. How much of undergrad was chewed up with largely irrelevant filler? And for all our talk of scientific rigour, psychologists are as starry-eyed about new unproven techniques as ever. You won’t find me saying a bad word about more real-world training, sooner.

The bottleneck that isn’t

The reform is framed around a bottleneck: not enough placements, not enough supervisors. It isn’t true.

About a quarter of registered psychologists are Board-approved supervisors. Roughly one in four. They are in private practice, the public sector, schools and NGOs, capable, approved and willing. What we don’t have is a system that pays them properly.

Supervision is time-intensive, carries risk and pulls a clinician away from billable work. Most universities pay supervisors well under $100 an hour, then struggle to find enough of them. In the registrar program I run, we pay substantially more than that, and we don’t struggle to find supervisors. The problem isn’t capacity. It’s the value placed on the work.

Building around the price problem

Instead of fixing the pricing, the reform works around it, cleverly. It aims to build placement capacity inside government-funded services, NGO contracts and large public mental health programs such as Headspace.

In theory that’s great: government services can afford to be less lean than a mum-and-dad private practice, so they can carry the cost of training. In practice, the federal government doesn’t deliver services and doesn’t trust the states with more money. It will tender the work out to a dozen large not-for-profits, which will take a sizeable clip off the top and partner with smaller agencies. While one part of the health department is reining in the NDIS, another is building a new one.

So which clinical experiences are cheapest to scale? Brief intervention, triage, protocol-driven care, low-risk presentations. All useful, all needed. But if that becomes most of your training, over time it becomes the profession.

The second tier

Add the psychology assistant pathway. On paper it makes sense: job-ready assistants supporting psychologists and increasing access. In a cost-constrained system it produces something else, a cheaper substitute workforce. We already worry about two tiers between clinical and registered psychologists. The next version is psychologists for complexity, oversight and liability, and assistants for high-volume, low-intensity work.

But if the system is designed around cost, why would it keep relying on the expensive tier? Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

Six safeguards before the profession signs on

Pay market rates for supervision, especially in private and complex settings. Otherwise you select the cheapest environments and least experienced supervisors.
Mandate clinical complexity. Trainees should show sustained therapy, complex case management and independent formulation, not just manualised care.
Hard limits on assistants’ scope. What can they do? Must they be overseen by a psychologist? If we don’t draw the line, funding pressure will.
Separate training from service economics. Protect trainees from KPIs and quotas, or they become a workforce input rather than trainees.
Fund supervision as professional work, not goodwill. Since COVID, I think we’re all out of goodwill.
Accreditation. We don’t trust universities not to cut corners, so APAC oversees them. Where are the accreditation standards for these new training centres?

The reform is trying to solve a real problem, but by redesigning the system to avoid the economics rather than fixing them. So the question isn’t only how we train more psychologists. It’s what kind of system they’ll be trained inside, and whether that system will still need them once they’re trained.