Your support needed for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex University
Dear sector colleagues
Please see below a call for support in holding onto the academic boundaries of the department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex university which could be in danger of merger.
Please read the statement below.
Please click the link to register your support and leave a comment. NCERCC has already done so.
It is vital this work continues, for all in children’s social care.
Courses in other places have already closed. We are now in danger of losing our past, present and future.
It is a successful department on every level. It teaches from Foundation degree up to PhDs and Professional Doctorates and produces awarding winning academic research.
This thinking and practice have been an inspiring foundation informing the development of Residential Child Care children benefit from today.
Please help the School of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies continue to help us to help children.
Statement: Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex university
The Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies (PPS) at the University of Essex represents something rare in UK higher education: a thriving, interdisciplinary home for psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, and critical mental health scholarship at a time when such spaces are disappearing.
The University of Essex is currently undergoing significant restructuring in response to sector-wide financial pressures, including the planned closure of its Southend Campus and a wider programme of redundancies totalling 400, and an academic structural reorganisation that could alter the autonomous and independent status of PPS.
Across the sector, many such specialist departments in many other places have been closed, merged, or diluted. With each restructuring, visibility shrinks, recruitment declines, partnerships weaken, and intellectual communities fragment. The long-term result is not efficiency. It is erosion.
PPS stands as proof that another model works. It brings together clinicians, scholars, artists, social scientists, and practitioners around a shared commitment to mental health, the talking therapies, and critical interdisciplinary research. It supports clinical training, world-leading scholarship, international collaboration, and widening participation. It is a visible hub for students, professional associations, and networks seeking serious engagement with psychoanalysis and psychosocial thought.
Its distinct identity is not cosmetic. It is the foundation of its national and international reputation.
Proposals that would dissolve, absorb or merge PPS into a larger disciplinary structure risk weakening one of the few dedicated interdisciplinary centres of its kind in the UK.
As we have found in Residential Child Care once lost such spaces are rarely rebuilt. This is not only an internal matter – it is a sector-wide issue. If we believe that psychoanalysis, psychosocial research, and interdisciplinary mental health scholarship have a future in UK universities, then we must say so clearly.
The PPS are calling on friends and allies in professional associations, clinical and therapeutic organisations, academic partners, and our alumni, students, and disciplinary colleagues, to express support for maintaining PPS as an independent psychoanalytic and psychosocial space.
Interdisciplinary intellectual communities do not survive by accident; they survive because people defend them and now is the moment to do so.
The Residential Child Care sector must show it stands with PPS in their fight for the future of psychoanalytic and psychosocial studies in UK higher education.
We need your voice – click here to register your support.
Thank you.
If you prefer to share your support directly with the University of Essex you can do so contacting the Vice Chancellor, Prof Frances Bowen vc@essex.ac.uk
Essex colleagues invite all support and welcome any ways in which you wish to stand with them or communicate this. If you would like to discuss anything about this call for support please do get in touch with PPS Head of Department, Dr Jessica Battersby jessica.battersby@essex.ac.uk
