ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors outline some of the features which they consider to be relevant in training professionals working with families and schools. Within a generic training for clinical psychologists, the share devoted to children and families is inevitably limited, with much of the emphasis on mental illness and learning difficulties in adults. When training professionals working with families and schools it is helpful to encourage them to recognize the intersystemic processes which practitioners need to be particularly aware of, namely mirroring and triangulation. Trainees need to be encouraged to get a ‘feel’ of what it might be like to experience a particular problem from different angles: that of the child, a parent or a teacher. The chapter looks at some of the opportunities and issues supervision raises. Supervision may offer a particularly useful way of introducing a more interactional perspective to qualified practitioners.
