You don’t have to look far to find a higher education report describing the benefits of work placements for university students. Both the Dearing report and the Wilson review of university-business collaboration argued in their favour, recommending that all undergraduate courses should include a year-long placement.
It is now widely accepted that placements boost students’ employability and aid their academic development. They have become popular across many disciplines. In my own field, the social sciences, I’ve seen a number of faculties sharing in the £19.5m Q-Step initiative, which aims to boost the statistical research skills of undergraduates through the use of placements and other forms of community engagement.
But are all students benefiting from what’s on offer?
One of the most common forms of placement is the sandwich degree programme, including the “thin” sandwich variant, where university study alternates with two shorter placements during the course. They have a number of merits. For students entering university straight from sixth form colleges, they offer a first taste of graduate-level employment and are widely used in more vocational degree programmes such as engineering, where there is a clear and close connection between the curriculum and industry.
But this model does not suit all students, course and universities. Many of my students at London Metropolitan University join us with a substantial amount of work experience already under their belts, have families and existing work commitments. They would not be keen to push their graduation one year further into the future. My own experience at another university of visiting students on year-long placements is far from encouraging:
I recall one young student crying over a photocopier in some anonymous office block at Winnersh Triangle, while another spent a year working with his dad at a factory in the North West – not the most useful work experience for students of politics and international relations.
Sandwich degree often emphasise work experience over the potential of learning from work and are not always the most meaningful episode in a lengthened degree programme.
Shorter, more integrated placements can work better for some students. As part of a three-year Hefce-funded study, my colleagues and I designed placements of five to 16 days that were embedded in second-year modules.
Students spent time undertaking research projects for their organisations, as well as researching how politics works in real-life situations. Our approach anticipated the debate on fair access to placements and internships, as students were able to hold down part-time jobs while benefitting from these more manageable and flexible placements.
But placements have their limitations. They are a very individualistic approach to learning, which sits rather uncomfortably with what we know about the advantages of peer learning and group work. We should look to the American models of service-learning and community action research, which are more amenable to group work and learning together.
And, although some departments treat them this way, placements are not a silver bullet for addressing the employability agenda. They don’t offer enough opportunities to develop work-related skills. Nor are they enough to transform traditional degee programmes into vocational courses – no matter how keen universities are to increase their offer of professionally-recognised qualifications.
We should use placements to open up the curriculum and show students how their academic knowledge can be applied in real life settings. But we must also accept that there are many ways of embedding and teaching employability in higher education. The emphasis on placements may lead us to neglect other modes of engaging with industry, both on and off campus, from which all students can benefit.
We also need to think carefully about how we assess student learning while they’re completing placements and off-campus activities. The professional development module at the University of Birmingham – which requires students to produce a 2,000 word self-reflective journal, in addition to completing a work-based project – is great at encouraging students to think analytically about their time away. All too often we are unclear about what we require students to extract from their experiences – and this needs to change.
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