Welcome to another special placement series where we follow social work student, Logan Bevan throughout his placement journey.
As a social work student, Logan must complete 1000 hours of placement throughout his degree over two separate placements.
In this series, we will follow Logan's progress week by week through behind-the-scenes highlights. This page will be kept updated with each highlight so you can keep track of his placement experience.
The aim of this series is to provide a glimpse of what it's like to be on placement and offer guidance to students feeling anxious about their own upcoming placements.
Weekly highlights
Click the link in each section to access Logan's placement experience for that week.
Logan records his highlights down in a notebook as they happen. The below entries are recorded soon after events or based from information that was written at the time. This method allows us to depict the placement experience as close to real-time as possible.
Introduction
Get to know Logan and his passion for social work in our introductory Q&A below.
Tell us a little about yourself?
Logan is also known for wearing bright shirts to work.
I grew up in a small rural remote community called Lightning Ridge. It's a very hot and dry place, and even though it's got modern infrastructure I grew up on the outskirts of town on a plot of land that was once a mining claim. It's kind of a hub town, in a sense, because there are a lot of farms and smaller mining communities that rely on the services available there. I tell people how isolated it is by saying that the nearest fast-food place is about a 3-hour drive away, and we don't have a Woolworths or Coles.
I got into social work because I was originally looking at psychology or engineering; psychology because I thought it was what social work actually was, and engineering because I love designing and problem solving. Eventually, I ended up doing social work because I had a conversation with my careers advisor who gave solid advice and pointed me in the right direction. Retrospectively though, I'd been filling the role of a social worker for years during school, just calling it psychology. I was always advocating for the high support students, making sure people get to the breakfast club if I could tell that they hadn't eaten, and helping people through various mental health crises. Admittedly, I was very much untrained and I made a lot of mistakes that worked one time leading me to think it was an actual solution, so I've spent a lot of time during my studies realising the full extent of the errors I used to make, but I got a lot of things right through experimentation and personal learning.
What is a Social Work Placement and why do you have to do it?
A social work placement is the opportunity to practice all of the skills you've learned during your studies. You work as a social worker who is supervised by a fully trained social worker, with the goal of developing your skills within the context of the place you're working in. Social workers in training have to do 1000 hours of placement throughout their degree, as set by the Australian Association of Social Workers, over two separate placements.
As well as the opportunity to practice, placement allows us the opportunity to see what we haven't learned as much of, allow us to practice things related to the degree that aren't taught such as relating to people and how we develop rapport. We also have the opportunity to see how we fit into the work environment outside of our clients; our ability to work as part of a team with other staff within our workplace is paramount to our ability to function as social workers.
How did you prepare for placement?
Because I am doing placement within a school, I had to learn a lot about how to work with children. I asked a couple of my friends who work with children full time for any advice they may have, then learned how various neurodivergencies affect children and how to best support them. I also had to spend a lot of time just making sure that I could operate in a child friendly manner, I had to learn how to speak in a way that children could understand, stop swearing as much as I had been since the covid lockdowns, and generally make sure that I could cope with the noisy, chaotic environment of a school.
There were several requirements that I had to meet to start placement. I had to get a police check and working with children's check, then I had to become vaccine compliant and make sure that the childhood vaccines that I had received had worked or needed a booster. Then I had to make sure that I had completed all the units that I needed to be placement compliant. It was a bit of an extended process to become health compliant, unfortunately, even though I was fully vaccinated as a child I still had to get some further vaccinations and several blood tests.
I didn't have much issue around accommodation or travel, as the social work placement team found me a placement opportunity close to home. It was a simple enough process that the placement coordinators assisted me with greatly; we had an extended conversation where I talked about my previous experiences and what I was looking for in a placement and she worked to find me a place nearby that met my needs and actually talked me out of taking on what would have been a much more intense placement for my first one.
Where is your placement? Do you get to choose where to go?
I'm doing my placement at Martin's Gully Public School. It's a small primary school in Armidale, with around 170 students. I was originally looking at a much bigger school, but after discussing back and forth and having an initial meeting with the principle of Martin's Gully, I chose to go there.
In my previous experiences, I've often been thrown in the deep end when I have had to use skills that I have spent time learning. And while I was ready to throw myself in the deep end once again, with what would have been a heavy placement in an environment I would not have found easy to exist in, the UNE placement coordinator made several good points around how my bad days would negatively impact the clients I was working with, and I settled on a less stressful placement in an environment I would find easier to adapt to.
What excites you about placement?
Everything. I was excited to be working again, to be able to use the skills I've developed, to be finally able to work out my professional identity, everything. I've been studying for long enough that I realised that I had forgotten some of the things I learned in my first few years. So, when I finally was in a position to do placement, I was absolutely ready and incredibly excited.
What is the most challenging part about preparing for placement?
In my case, I had to spend a lot of time preparing myself to be working with children. I'm a large, muscular man, and I've previously been told that I unintentionally come across as threatening to vulnerable people like children, so I had to spend a lot of time making sure that my posture, facial expressions, the clothes that I'm wearing, how I speak and act, and even how I laugh did not come across as threatening or intimidating. While this might seem like over preparation, I would much rather be safe than sorry when working with vulnerable people, and I recognise that I have previously accidentally scared people, and I would much rather not risk that when working with children.
I also had to start jogging so I could keep up with the children without hurting myself. I quite dislike jogging, especially during the colder months as I have cold triggered asthma, but I found a way to work around it so I could partake in their games and sports without bringing harm to myself.
Do you think there are any benefits of practicing healthcare in country areas?
Different areas have different environments and relevant factors. Cities like Armidale and Tamworth, all the way up to Sydney or Brisbane may have higher rates of homelessness and drug addiction, but they also have more options for support services relative to population. For example, country areas that are more rural and remote may have higher rates of alcoholism or addiction to specific drugs and lower rates of homelessness, but have a larger ratio of the population living in lower socioeconomic status, or they may simply lack basic resources like food, water and electricity that would otherwise be plentiful.
Doing placements in a variety of locations, or at bare minimum having experience living in a variety of locations, is paramount to being an effective social worker in those areas. It also helps to fully contextualise the opportunities and resources available in cities, and how significantly a population's average quality of life can be lowered in the absence of what many may consider a given.
Are there any barriers to practicing and studying social work in regional areas?
Lack of opportunity. Armidale has several schools, several hospitals and health clinics, and several other locations that offer placement opportunities to students. My hometown, in comparison, has one school, one hospital, and one GP that take placement students, to my knowledge none of which have taken students from UNE. The only barrier I've faced so far in Armidale is that if I want to have a face to face meeting with my supervisor, one of us has to make a quick half hour drive. Everything else is mostly ideal for the purposes of getting a degree and getting placement experience.
What is one piece of advice you might offer upcoming placement students?
I can't say that I can give good advice for other placement locations, but for schools I've got heaps: be the adult that you wish you could have had around you when you were in school. You aren't there to be a teacher or a teacher's aide, you're there to be a social worker, so you're allowed to make friends with them as you build rapport and you're allowed to be friends with them (nuance applied, of course, you can't invite them over for drinks of a weekend but you can certainly play handball and talk about Pokémon at lunch).
You aren't walking into a school full of children, you're walking into a school full of adults who haven't been alive for long enough to be good at it yet, so treat them as such. The way I like to think of it is like this: Michael Caine and Tim Curry both gave spectacular performances in their respective Muppet movies, but Michael saw the Muppets as other esteemed actors while Tim saw himself as another Muppet. Both of those mentalities gave way to spectacular performances, but they both saw themselves as equal to the actors around them. Children are like the Muppets, but there's time to look at them as fellow esteemed actors and times to look at yourself like a Muppet. I spent most of my first couple of days in the classroom acting like a student, sitting on the floor, doing the work where it was relevant and putting my hand up to answer questions, but there were times where I had to stand up and be an adult surrounded by adults who needed some extra support. They'll tell you what they need in the words they know, they'll state their boundaries and what they don't need, and they'll know if you're being demeaning or insincere, so be sincere. It's tricky to explain the nuance in this, but if this doesn't make any sense just treat them like you want them to be friends with you and use age-appropriate language and you'll do fine.
Also, every time you walk into a classroom for the first time, ask the teacher if you can take some time to introduce yourself and what you do. Say that you aren't a teacher and you aren't watching to get them in trouble, if you have a notepad or something you take notes on tell them what it's for (in age-appropriate language), talk about the things you like, talk about your hometown, give them a variety of things about yourself so they've got something to use as an in when they come up and talk to you.
