Lengthy unpaid placements in social work: exploring the impacts on student wellbeing

ABSTRACT

In Australia, there are 130,000 students studying social work across 30 universities. The Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) mandates the completion of at least 1,000 hours of field education for qualification, across at least two placements in different fields of practice. This means a full-time social work placement at 7.5 hours per day is typically just under 3.5 months’ duration. Yet, recent Australian research has demonstrated that students experience significant levels of financial and other stress during lengthy, unpaid placements. In response to this, we surveyed Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) students who were currently undertaking or had recently undertaken (n = 60) their first or second field placement at Victoria University, in Australia to elicit their feedback on their experiences of lengthy unpaid placements. The descriptive survey was completed anonymously online and consisted of 38 short answer questions that elicited demographic information and respondents’ opinions on key field placement criteria. The results of this study have important implications for field education, as it adds to the existing calls for a reworking of the AASW accreditation standards to address this issue. Future research could incorporate feedback from field liaisons, and field directors.

KEYWORDS:

• Field education
• accreditation standards
• paid work
• financial hardship
• mental health

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest is reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Victoria University Feminist Research Network.

Notes on contributors

Lisa Hodge

Lisa Hodge, PhD is a lecturer in Social Work and a Research Fellow in the Institute of Health and Sport, at Victoria University. Her research interests include gender and mental health and arts based research methods.

Nicole Oke

Nicole Oke, PhD is a senior lecturer in the College of Arts and Education at Victoria University. She is interested in place-based understandings of power and privilege and recently co-edited a book, Places of Privilege. She has previously worked on the evaluation of early childhood programs.

Heather McIntyre

Heather McIntyre, BA; BA Hons; Grad Dip Applied Science is a Doctoral Candidate and Research Assistant in the Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Research Group, at the University of South Australia.  Her research interests include evidence based suicide prevention strategies for refugee and asylum seeker caseworkers, first responders and refugees in detention.

Shelley Turner

Shelley Turner, PhD is a senior lecturer in Social Work at Monash University. Her current research projects focus on supporting students to deal with aggressive behaviours on placement, criminal justice knowledge co-production, youth justice case management, and after-hours youth bail and remand decision-making.