After years of being ignored by governments, universities and union bureaucrats, the crisis of unpaid placement-induced student poverty and burnout is reaching a peak. As rent and food prices soar, and a further increase in HECS indexation rate has been announced last week, it is soul-crushing to live in a world that seems to have such a disdain for young people and students wanting to work in essential fields, such as nursing, education, and social work.
In our context of broken welfare, childcare and health systems, the fact of not paying students for hundreds of hours of labour in community-based studies is both archaic and dystopian. Whilst this exploitation is wholly unfair for any student, this systemic failure concretises the current state of higher education as expensive, inaccessible and elitist.
I sat down to interview with Mai, the force behind the Queensland branch of Students Against Placement Poverty (SAPP). As an unpaid carer for her daughter, and a disabled person herself, Mai and I chatted as members of the SAPP campaign about the experiences of unpaid placements for disabled students and student carers.
Mai is undertaking a Masters of Social Work and has a background in Sociology and Counselling. With an interest in trauma, social work, and helping young people, Mai has been a vocal advocate for paid placements and for policy to help marginalised groups, focusing on systemic change.
Despite the value of this knowledge, Mai emphasised that study in these fields is “not lived experience friendly,” referencing the curricula, study loads, and requirements for placement of both professional boards and universities.
Her personal experiences meant that she knew to question the course’s focus on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) as a blanket psycho-social intervention for mental health conditions, and helped her to see how these curricula and services were part of a broken system.
This is important to clarify. Mai emphasised that marginalised and disadvantaged students are not failing — they are just not accommodated for, and cannot afford courses requiring placements. Despite her humility, she shared that herself and many of her peers are on the Dean’s List, and are perfectly qualified and suited to these courses and jobs.
We discussed the hypocrisy of fields like Social Work and Nursing being inhospitable to its students, while their Codes of Ethics emphasise safety, the “inherent dignity and worth of the person,” treating “each person in a caring and respectful fashion, mindful of individual differences and cultural and ethnic diversity”.
Yet, students in these fields are exploited and disempowered — planted in “poisoned soil” to be “cut off before you can even grow.” For these fields that are so essential to the community and as we face crises of shortages of health workers, early childhood educators and carers, aged carers, disabilities carers, it is a slap in the face for both students and our communities.
As announced in October 2023, police students in New South Wales are now being paid more than $1300 a week for 16 weeks of study to address NSW’s shortage of officers. Yet this is an institution that has always targeted marginalised groups such as First Nations peoples and gender diverse people, it is deplorable that the government has not yet implemented any compensation for students of nursing, social work, and education who directly work in and with our communities.
Mai further notes that there is a necessary “cognitive dissonance” for teachers and supervisors to teach about care and community work while their students struggle. It is a luck of the draw when it comes to supervisors, who can make or break students’ experiences with placement.
“A lot of us are facing homelessness, or housing insecurity, or skipping meals, or getting […] red bills in the mail.”
Factoring marginalised students into policies for placements
Students, unions, professionals, the National Union of Students, and now even the Universities Accord Report have denounced placement poverty and called for ending unpaid placements. The Report, however, fails to incorporate existing calls for the government to revise the Fair Work Act to ensure that unpaid placements become illegal, and merely recommends that students on placements be offered funding, rather than wages in line with industry standards.
Students Against Placement Poverty have been unapologetically vocal and have had recent successes across a National Week of Action from April 8-12 with forums, a rally outside of the Commonwealth Minister offices in Sydney, and events in Queensland. With this pressure, paid placements have made their way into discussions around the 2024-2025 Federal Budget, to be announced in a few weeks time.
Regarding considerations for disabled students and student carers in potential policies, Mai emphasised the need for a model of compensation that does not interfere with students’ pensions, and accounts for extra costs of placement.
She shared concerns of people being disqualified from their Youth Allowance, carer payments, or disability support pensions if they receive remuneration in an unhelpful way, such as not being tax-exempt, or a large sum not spread out over placement weeks, that jeopardises their eligibility. Placements must also provide for superannuation, particularly since pensions do not, and must go beyond the minimum wage for hours worked to include the costs of uniforms and transport. Mai also cited ‘the disability tax’ — noting that you “pay more to exist as a disabled person” and to care for people, referencing examples of forking out more money for convenient meals and for late fees, often due to being short on time or struggling with deadlines.
However, of course, we pointed out that broken welfare systems, a rental crisis, and unsatisfactory calculations of a ‘living wage’ underpin many of these concerns. Paid placements and better conditions for students are just the tip of the iceberg, but are worth the fight due to the adverse effects they are currently having on whole cohorts of students, and the ways in which they harm already marginalised students.
Mai also called for a re-imagining and re-envisioning of regulatory peak bodies and capability frameworks for students. The peak bodies are unnecessarily bureaucratic and lack transparency in deciding the number of hours of placement that students must complete. For a dual degree of nursery and midwifery, 1700 placement hours are required. During 2020-2021 under COVID-19 restrictions, students’ placement hours were made more flexible and reduced by up to 20% under a modified Australian Social Work Education and Accreditation Standards (ASWEAS).
The research of Professor Christine Morley, Head of QUT School of Social Work, highlights the unsustainability of the current placement model, and calls for changes to the Fair Work Act to make unpaid vocational placements illegal, to pay students a minimum wage, and to reform the measurement of learning towards meeting qualitative outcomes instead of a number of hours.
For her Masters of Social Work, Mai has completed one round of a 500 hour placement and has another to go. She says, however, that she had already met the capability requirements after 250 hours of placement due to her prior studies and work — meaning that the further 750 remaining hours are unnecessary.
It is undeniable that placement poverty and burnout prevents students from properly learning on placement, and an excess of required hours “cannot justify the harm that it causes.” We are facing a worsening of our current crisis — both in terms of graduation and employment numbers and in terms of the professional capability of those who make it past placement.
