Field Education and Covid-19
Crisis and Opportunity
Keywords:
Social Work; Field Education; Covid-19Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has shone a stark light on the pre-existing crisis in social work field education, and deepened it, resulting in many programs globally having to cancel and/or postpone placements. This article describes the experience of a university field education team in Melbourne, Australia, and the strategies they employed to provide students with a meaningful field education experience, despite being located in one of the most locked-down cities in the world. Key reflections include that it was collaborative industry partnerships, as well as added flexibility in the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) field education standards, that were instrumental in weathering the storm of Covid-19. The authors also suggest temporary changes do not go far enough in responding to the crisis in field education, and that a major re-structure of current requirements is needed at a national level to meet the needs of students and the social work sector.
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