“Placements are an integral part of the Faculty of Education, Health and Human Sciences; we are a team of 10 staff that work tirelessly all year round to ensure that each student gets the best possible placements for their chosen subject.
Our placements range from colleges, secondary schools, primary schools, and nurseries for our education placements, to hospitals, prisons, mental health and learning disability facilities, hospices for end-of-life care, neonatal wards, Accident and Emergency, children’s wards, specialist children’s services, oncology, cardiology, Intensive Care and community teams for our health students. The midwifery students attend labour wards, community midwifery teams, breast feeding clinics, post-natal, ante-natal and specialised midwifery placements to name but a few. They also have to deliver 40 babies over the three-year programme! Our paramedic students are mostly on placement with the ambulance services. However, we do support them with a two-week placement in a ward, doctor’s surgery or A&E/Urgent Care setting.
For our Human Science students, we place social work students in statutory placements for 100 days – these can be within local authorities, fostering agencies or mental health service providers, alongside a 70-day non-statutory placement in settings such as charities, Age UK, housing agencies etc. For all our students we rely on many private, voluntary, and independent settings and charities.
We work very closely with our partners and are exceptionally grateful for the help and support they provide us, however we can come up against many challenges which impact on placements such as geography, as there is a maximum travel time for a student to a placement. We have had challenges due to the pandemic with schools being unable to take students, staff sickness within the school, schools being unable to accept students for a wide variety of reasons, ward closures, reduction in services, and competing for placements with other universities, meaning the team is under constant pressure to find placements for over 1,500 students.
We also work very closely with the Programme Support Team, Finance and the Learning and Technological Team.”
Some of the feedback we have received is as follows:
‘I appreciate that the University found me an outstanding setting that is finely tuned in with my values and interests, The school has been welcoming, inspiring and motivating in equal measures.’
‘Being on placement is such a wonderful experience, it gives you an insight into what everyday life will be like once I qualify and it is an amazing experience.’
Any last words from Zoe?
“Managing the Practice Based Learning and Placements Team is a real honour for me and after 11 years of working within the team I still look forward to seeing what the day will bring as every day brings a new challenge. If anyone would like any further information or have any contacts within a setting that you think maybe suitable for our students, please do not hesitate to get in touch.”
