Why have so many people applied to the clearing house for DClinPsy this year?

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Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. I am Dr. Maryanne Trent. I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. Thank you so much for joining me today. Today's sort of a special request, sort of plug the gap help with this kind of where I'm at right now, episode. So if you are currently striving to be an aspiring clinical psychologist, you might well know that we are in the middle of application notification season about whether you are being called to interview this year. So this episode is going live on Monday, the 13th of March, 2023. And that is quite an important week because on the 17th of March, also known as St. Patrick's Day, that is the deadline for all of the courses to have notified their applicants whether they're going to be offering them an interview or not this year. So if you're listening to this and you don't yet know whether you are getting an interview, then you've got until Friday.

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So after that point, hopefully you will know and you won't need to keep refreshing and scrolling and busying yourself and wondering and hoping, unless of course you are on the reserve list, in which case things probably will continue in that vein for a while for you until those interviews for your course that you are on the reserve list for have passed. So this week has been tricky for some and, you know, euphoric for others and sometimes a bit of a mixed bag as well. Sometimes people were told a no thanks not yet one day to then get a course, offer of an interview or a course offer for a reserve place the next day, or maybe, you know, one of each, you know a no thanks, not yet an interview and a reserve place. And that's, you know, , that's a lot of, it's a lot of stuff to try and get your head around.

(: 02:31

So if this is where you are at right now, but of course you might be listening to this in years to come when it is your time and when this is relevant for you because the beauty of podcasts and YouTube, if you've never been onto my YouTube channel Dr. Marianne Trent, it's probably time that you did. It's probably time that you check that out and subscribed. So yeah, the beauty of this is it's gonna hang around so that it will be there when you need it and when it will resonate with you the most. I have got a few more podcast episodes already in the can and ready to roll, and they are guest interviews, but I thought that it seemed really important for us to do some stuff that's about the right now right now. So, so I decided to hastily record this because people who have been contacting me kind of amazed really about the number of applicants that the courses are telling them have applied this year.

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So I thought it might be useful to have a little bit of a look at some of the data from previous years. So let's have a look at that together. So it seems a good place to start with the pre pandemic stats. So those that we are looking at right now on YouTube, or I'll talk you through them if you're listening on podcast, are from 2019 for 2019 entry. So the year that people actually applied for that would've been 2018. So the deadline would've been December, 2018. So that year there were 614 places and there were 4,054 applicants. So that gave a success rate of getting a place of 15% of, well of course you know, people will have probably had interviews at multiple courses. So that, that success rate is skewed a little bit. That's sort of assuming that each applicant only is offered one place.

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So yes, that's, you know, somebody might have had potentially four offers and so their success rate would've been, you know, a hundred percent. But yeah, this is done as, as all of the applicants and you know, there's only so many courses to go around, so that's where they get the 15% from. Let's go on now to have a look at the people who would've started their training in September, 2020. So that would've been kind of in the middle of the pandemic, wouldn't it? They would've applied perhaps when they just started to hear whisperings about Covid 19 which would've been December, 2019. So then there were 4,225 applicants for 770 places. So you can see that the success rate for them was 18%. That's a whopping increase of 25.4 places compared to the previous year, but only a 4.21 increase on applicants that year, which meant that there was effectively a success rate of 18% that year.

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So a have a quick look at the entry for 2021. So again, people would've applied during the pandemic. They would've applied by by December, 2020 ready to start in September, 2021. So that year there were 979 places available. There were 4,544 applicants that made a success rate of 22%. So let's look at the percentage increase then. So that was an absolute boner, just over 27% increase in places available and only a 7.55% increase in numbers of applicants that year, which made the success rate 22%, which seems a lot nicer, but of course can still be brutal. Absolutely brutal. We're gonna take a short break here and then I'll be back and we'll discuss some more stats.

(: 07:22

Okay, welcome back. Do remember that the Clinical Psychologist Collective books and the Aspiring Psychologist Collective books can be really useful for helping you to build skills and confidence in talking about your reflections, which can be really, really useful for you to be able to do during interviews. And of course we do lots of stuff around that in the membership as well, and people are saying really lovely things saying that they just feel that their development has come on leaps and bounds and people have been getting interviews. So if you have an interview and you'd welcome some extra development skills, coaching confidence boosting, then do check out the Aspiring Psychologist membership. Okay, so in the first half we were looking at some stats from the previous years provided by the clearinghouse website. So last but not least, we're looking at the people who are currently, as I record this first year trainee clinical psychologists.

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They would've started applying autumn 2021 to start in September, 2022. So that time around there were 1,155 places funded places available, that was a 17.97% increase on places. So not quite as much of an increase as last year, but there was only a 2.44% increase on applicants at 4,655. So the success rate there was 25%. So yeah, last year things were looking good. You might on paper have, oh, things are heading in a really positive direction, but the early stats that seem to be coming through from individual courses is that people have received complete spikes in the numbers of people applying. And certainly some of the people I really would've expected to be getting shortlisted for interview we're told No thanks, not yet. Keep trying. And so yes, what's going on really is, is what I'm thinking about today. And we will of course I will come back to this as and when the stats are available.

(: 09:32

So the clearinghouse page on the website was last updated on the 25th of August. So what I will do is I will try and make a note for myself to have another look at the stats for this year and come back to talk about that. But I guess some of my thoughts were, well, have we done really well in kind of inclusion? And for people who are thinking maybe the pandemic effect has made them think life's too short or, you know, maybe now is the time or maybe they're feeling that, you know, all of the empowerment we've done for age just being a number has made people come back to earlier career choices that they might have discounted along the way. Or it might be that if you remember in 2020 Health Education England announced quite spontaneously on the day the Clinical Psychologist Collective was published, thanks for that h e e it meant that had to do a swift rewrite of including a FU chapters that they were not going to be funding people who'd already had Health Education England funding within the last two years.

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So they did do a bit of a u-turn on that and they delayed it by two years. But by my reckoning, this means that the current year is the last year for a while where you'll be able to apply if you have had health Education England funding before. So that could well be why, but I would love your thoughts on this. Let me know what you think. Also would love it if you come and follow me on TikTok and Instagram. I'm trying to do really hard in growing my audience there. So yeah, please do come and follow me, like connect on all those good places. I'm Dr. Maryanne Trent and yeah, just be part of my world. Come and rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcast too, and I will look forward to catching up with you very soon. Take care