Psychological Services

Psychological Services staff provide support to students in the Durham District School Board (DDSB) who are experiencing mental health, learning, developmental, social or behavioural difficulties that can affect their schooling. We offer these services to students in elementary and secondary school.

How to access services

If you are a student, you can directly request to speak to Psychological Services staff members if you understand the services you want and can give informed consent.

If you are a concerned parent, you should speak with your child's teacher or principal. School staff may consult with us to decide if a referral may help. Your child's name will remain confidential during this process. After a consultation, you may need to sign a Consent of Service form and we will contact you to ensure we have your consent to proceed with the services.

You can contact Psychological Services through:

  • Your child's school principal
  • Special Education Resource Teacher (SERT) (elementary schools)
  • Head of Special Education (secondary schools)
  • Head of Guidance (secondary schools)
  • Psychological Services staff assigned to your school
  • Senior Manager and Clinical Lead of Psychology with the DDSB Education Centre

Our services

Services range from counselling and psychological assessments to crisis response.

Clinical consultation

Clinical consultation is available to parents and guardians, educational staff, and other DDSB professional services staff and community partners. This service allows you to consult with us to determine if a referral to psychological services would be helpful for your student. All information is confidential, including the student's name, during the consultation process.

Direct services

Our direct services include clinical interventions, counselling, and brief therapy appointments. We offer these services to individual students or groups of students.

Psychological assessments

We conduct psychological assessments to determine the individual needs of our students. These assessments include clinical, behavioural, psychological, and social or developmental assessments.

Crisis response

This service is available to students and schools for incidents related to violence, suicide risk and tragic or traumatic events. We follow the DDSB protocols on violence threat risk assessment, suicide prevention and intervention, crisis and loss and trauma response.

Capacity building

We want to help educate DDSB staff on psychological services through direct training, committee work, support of school initiatives, and individual teacher consultation.

Consent and privacy

We follow the best practice guidelines of the College of Psychologists of Ontario. We only offer services after receiving informed consent from the parent, guardian or a capable student.

We train our personnel on the Personal Health Information Protection Act. We only collect the information necessary to provide the requested service and we won't disclose personal information without your knowledge or consent. There are a few legal exceptions to this rule when:

  • Circumstances indicate the possibility of abuse
  • There is risk of harm to self or others
  • A court issues a subpoena