Partnerships and Opportunities

We work with a range of different types of external partners, which enables us to enhance opportunities for our students, as well as enrich the value and impact of our research and insights. Here are some of the ways we work with our partners and external organisations.

Live Briefs in modules

Some of our partners work with us to provide live briefs which we introduce to students within modules. These typically represent real organisational challenges which our students are tasked with, to apply their psychologically-informed ideas or strategies to offer solutions or actionable insights.

One example is within our first year Introduction to Applied Psychology module, in which students are tasked with designing a psychologically-informed community initiative. Some of the live briefs provided by our partners include:

• How can psychological theory and practice be used to increase social cohesion and engagement with community-based mental health and wellbeing services?
• Design an intervention that connects 16–25-year-olds facing social isolation
• Propose a strategy to change family behaviours using theory-based interventions, targeting children and caregivers in deprived urban areas.

Research Project Briefs

For partners who want to draw on our research, data and evaluation expertise, we can support them to work with our students and/or staff on research projects. This might be to collect primary data to help explore or evaluate organisational issues.

If you are looking for a low-cost option, we can offer student projects as internship projects or other work-related learning opportunities within our Behavioural Data Service.

The type of things our students receive research and data analysis training on include:

• Evaluating academic literature (e.g., literature searching, critically evaluating the relevance and quality of research, synthesising findings across studies)
• Designing a research study (e.g., conducting interviews and focus groups, designing surveys and experimental studies, participant recruitment)
• Applying for ethical approval
• Collecting and analysing qualitative and quantitive data (e.g., perceptions, attitudes, performance, behaviour)
• Writing a research report 

If you are looking to draw on the more specialised research or data expertise of our staff, we can offer consultancy options via our Behavioural Data Service, starting with an initial free 30 minute consultation session where we can help you identify your next steps.

Employability provision

We have a number of annual flagship events to support the employability and entrepreneurship of our students. One is our Mock Assessment Centre event. This is designed for our second year undergraduate psychology students, to help them prepare for real situations when applying for graduate roles. This actively engages our students in the process of writing job application forms, psychometric testing and being interviewed. This not only helps our students develop key employability and transferable skills, but supports them to effectively articulate them to employers.

We actively work with employers who support the delivery of our Mock Assessment Centre day. Some of the organisations who have previously supported us on this include: Enterprise, West Lancashire Borough Council, Royal Air Force (RAF), Autism Initiatives, and AEC – Airborne Environmental Consultants Ltd.

Some of the activities our partner support during our Mock Assessment Centre day include:

• Observing students as they participate in group exercises
• Providing constructive feedback on interview performance
• Sharing insights about their organisation and career pathways

Work-related learning opportunities

Many of our partners offer placements, volunteering, part-time roles and graduate opportunities to our students. We have a Psychology Work Placement module in which our students are required to do a minimum of 50 hours of work, and then reflect on how psychological theory relates to professional workplace practices.

Previous placements providers have tasked our students with placement projects such as designing, delivering and evaluating inclusive educational provision for SEN learners in mainstream schools. This not only supports our students to gain experiential ways of applying their subject knowledge and skills, but has also ensured they have contributed added significant value to these organisations.

Guest lectures

We have a range of partners who provide valuable contributions to our curriculum via guest lectures within our modules. These are typically within our pathway modules, such as Educational Psychology, where our professional partners offer expert subject knowledge, provide industry insights and can offer advice on careers in their respective domains.

Some of our guest lecture sessions include:

• The role of the Educational Psychologist in the classroom
• Solution-focusing in education
• Resilience for psychology practitioners
• Mental health in schools

Research and knowledge exchange partners

We work closely with a range of partners and organisations, to support our research to have real-world value and impact, and bring benefit to individuals, communities and society.

Given our expertise in domains such as health psychology and educational psychology, many of these are charity and third sector organisations particularly in domains such as cancer support, alcohol recovery, reading and literacy trusts and children’s services.

Similarly, we work with many health trusts and organisations including: Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, Princess Royal Spinal Cord Injuries Centre, Royal Preston Hospital, University College London Hospital, Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust, Merseycare NHS Foundation Trust, and NHS North-West England.

Finally, our expertise in areas such as forensic psychology means we work with various Government agencies including the United Nations, West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner, West Midlands Violence Reduction Partnership, and London Violence Reduction Partnership.

If you are interested in working with us, you might want to explore more about our research and knowledge exchange activities including our research groups.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

We are keen to work with organisations to help them address key strategic projects or challenges they might be encountering. They can  access our leading knowledge and research through Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs). KTPs bring together forward-thinking organisations and our expert academics to tackle strategic innovation challenges to deliver economic, societal or environmental outcomes.

Here are some of the strategic challenges our psychology expertise can contribute:

•             Improving the performance of products/services/processes which target positive brain health and mental well-being

•             Improving the performance of products/services/processes which support knowledge acquisition or learning outcomes

•             Managing people and teams through transformative organisational change (e.g. digital adoption and innovation, motivating behaviour, coaching through change)

Professional Advisory Panel

We have a Professional Advisory Panel which consists many of our partners. The primary purpose of our panel is to provide a platform to facilitate dialogue to help us gain strategic insight to ensure our portfolios and provisions are aligned to help address current and future organisational and societal needs as well as sector-specific challenges. This consists of providing direction, leadership, and guidance to us on a number of areas, including, but not limited to:

• the employability of students and graduates
• curriculum content and skills provision
• industry needs and priorities of organisations within different sectors
• how our work can benefit the region both socially and economically

All this helps us to ensure that the work we do is relevant, meaningful and can be impactful for all.