Supporting social work learners: practice educator refresher (England)
Introduction
Welcome to Supporting social work learners: practice educator refresher (England), a course designed to support practice educators (PEs) in England. Designed for PEs with lapsed currency, this course will enable you to update your knowledge and skills in supporting and assessing social work students and apprentices in their practice placements.
You should note that this course is not designed to teach you how to become a practice educator; you should be a qualified and registered social worker who has completed certified practice educator training in the past. This course will ensure you have refreshed your learning ready to support a social work student or apprentice in their placement.
Badge and declaration
While studying this course, you have the option to work towards gaining a digital badge.This course is not moderated and the digital badge you receive for completing the course and its associated activities relies on self-assessment. If you are using this course to refresh your knowledge and to enable you to support students on their placements, you may want to discuss the content of your self-assessment within supervision or with a trusted colleague; this would also enable you to record the activity as continuing professional development (CPD) with Social Work England, including a peer discussion.
To obtain your badge you will need to:
- select ‘Yes’ in the Declaration at the link below
- read all sessions of the course
- score 50% or more in the end-of-course badge quiz.
Access Declaration [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] now.
Learning activities
The course includes learning activities throughout, and you should complete all of these. Your responses and answers will be anonymous in the course, however you should ensure that care is taken to anonymise them if discussing them with a colleague. You should also ensure that your answers reflect your social work values and professional standards.
Many of the learning activities will be relevant to PEs working in other nations but the course is mapped to Practice Educator Professional Standards (PEPS) (BASW, 2022) and Social Work England (SWE) requirements for PEs.
A note about terminology
Within this course, the term ‘learner’ is used when referring to social work students and apprentices. We recognise that some organisations (such as Social Work England) refer to ‘students’, whereas others refer to ‘learners’. In this course, we have chosen to use learners because this is the terminology used within the refreshed PEPS Standards.
Activity preparation: Working with a social work learner
As part of the final activity within this course you are asked to confirm that you have received feedback on your practice in working with a social work learner. There is flexibility here to be creative with the way that you capture this feedback, and the learner with whom you work. The goal of this activity is to enable you to consider how you could implement this refreshed learning in your practice, and to receive feedback.
You should start to think about how you might complete this task now so you can arrange to work with a social work learner during completion of this course and before you reach the final activity.