People First (Scotland) regularly offers student placements to Universities running Social Work courses. Sometimes we will take on Community Education students as well.
Members are always involved in meeting the students before the placement to decide if the student will fit in with the work of People First. Some of the staff are qualified social workers, some are qualified nurses and some are qualified community workers or group workers or counsellors. Two of the staff are currently qualified as practice teachers.
Usually, there are three areas of work allocated to students-
- work with individuals on something they need help in changing. This can be about housing, about sorting out benefits or support, about relationships, about contact with police or criminal justice or child protection services or about working on something inside the person such as getting over a bad thing which has happened or a feeling they have been left with.
- work with groups - lots of our work is with self-advocacy groups where people find and give support to each other and work out how to challenge the system to make things better
- support with representation where the student will, like our development staff, give support to members who are putting forward the views of members and groups to serrvice providers, to local authorities or the NHS and to government.
The feedback from students and from Universities about the quality of placements at People First has been very good indeed. We call what we do community social work and "opportunity-led" radical social work. Of course, it can also be thought of as community work.