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The purpose of this paper is to build a theoretical model of how and what clinical psychologists learn from service user and carer involvement in their training.

A qualitative research design was adopted, and verbatim transcripts of semi-structured interviews conducted with 12 clinical psychologists were analysed using grounded theory methodology.

Findings indicated that clinical psychologists learned from service user and carer involvement in a variety of ways and a preliminary model was proposed, encompassing four main categories: “mechanisms of learning”, “relational and contextual factors facilitating learning”, “relational and contextual factors hindering learning” and “impact”.

Further research is required to establish to what extent the current findings may be transferrable to learning from service user and carer involvement in the context of educating professionals from other disciplines. Additionally, participants had limited experiences of carer involvement, and more research in this area specifically would be useful.

This study advocates for service user and carer involvement in clinical psychology training, and specific recommendations are discussed, including service user perspectives.

Service user and carer involvement has become mandatory in Health Care Professional Council-approved training programmes for mental health professionals, yet if and how learning occurs is poorly understood in this context. This study makes an important contribution in evaluating outcomes of service user and carer involvement in clinical psychology training by advancing theoretical understanding of the learning processes involved. The authors are unaware of similar work.

This paper aims to describe the challenges and rewards of service user and carer involvement in clinical psychology training as experienced in one training centre.

After outlining the major challenges of involvement in higher education and in clinical psychology training, the paper describes the work carried out by the authors. Members of the service user and carer advisory group Salomons Advisory Group of Experts by Experience (SAGE) recount their experiences of working with them in clinical psychology and Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) training. The challenges of inclusion and specific approaches that are used to work with these are explored.

Members of SAGE have experienced their contributions to the work in positive ways. However, inclusion in this context requires everyone involved to fully acknowledge the social and historical barriers in order to work together to overcome them.

Some of the approaches to meeting the challenges of inclusion in doctoral level clinical training may be applicable in other places.

In the authors' experience, true inclusion means openness to the authoritative voices of people not normally viewed as educators. A parallel question is the degree to which professionals feel safe to admit to service user experience or to draw upon other aspects of their personhood while working professionally. This may be crucial for successful partnership.

The authors are still on this journey of inclusion, and hope that by sharing some of their experiences of its complexities that they may help illuminate some elements of others' journeys.

There is much literature regarding the involvement of service users in the training of mental health professionals, yet there are few specific examples of such initiatives. This paper aims to report an innovative way of involving service users via DVDs in the teaching psychological formulation on the Trent Clinical Psychology Doctorate programme.

A focus group was held with the service users involved in teaching psychological formulation and analysed using thematic analysis incorporating saliency analysis.

Analysis revealed ten themes, which broadly fell into two categories: service users' experience of involvement and consideration of the impact on teaching and improving trainee experience.

It is believed that this approach could not only inform the teaching of psychological formulation but also inspire other innovative opportunities to involve service users in the training of mental health professionals.