Key Elements to Field Placements for Child Welfare Preparation

Overview: Quality field education is essential to prepare students for child welfare practice. Strong partnerships with child welfare agencies, a focus on developing a realistic understanding of child welfare work, and inclusion of students as team members contribute to students feeling strongly prepared as the future child welfare workforce.Proposal text: Background
Over 10 years, the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute has supported more than 25 partnerships between universities and child welfare agencies have provided stipends to over 600 BSW and MSW students. The university-agency partnerships implemented a number of innovative strategies that allowed universities and agencies to work in collaborative partnership to design field placements that were intentional in meeting the developmental needs of students as well as meeting needs of child welfare agencies for preparing the future workforce.

Methods
Evaluation of this program included gathering data from stipend recipients while they were students and after they graduated and were working in child welfare. Our mixed method sample includes 322 survey respondents and 105 interview participants.

Results
Qualitative and quantitative data has established the importance and value of quality field placement experiences for students to feel prepared for the child welfare profession. With the sample of these stipend students, results of a regression analysis predicting Readiness for Child Welfare Work indicated that the overall model was significant with 43% of the variance explained, F(5, 283) = 42.31, p ≤ .001. Statistically significant predictors included Field Placement Fit, and Field Instructors, Child Welfare Competencies, and Instructional Content. This finding indicates that positive experiences with relevant and supportive instructional content, field placement, and field instructors, as well as higher levels of knowledge of child welfare practice are related to higher preparedness to be a child welfare professional.

In addition to the quantitative findings, themes from interviews with students and graduates enhanced the quantitative findings by identifying key elements necessary for a quality field experience. The themes emphasized the importance of universities and agencies working in collaboration to best design field placement experiences that enhance the experience for both students and field supervisors. They also indicated that the best preparation for child welfare work is hands-on experiences as child welfare practitioners that build their competence and confidence both in working with families and in working within agencies. The qualitative themes from the student and graduate interviews were:
1. Students need practical experiences for skill development in all areas of child welfare work, including family engagement and administrative responsibilities.
2. Students should be fully integrated in the agency as team members in their field supervisors’ units as well as onboarded to the culture of child welfare agencies.
3. Collaboration and cooperation between universities and agencies is particularly important in developing child welfare-specific field orientations and learning contracts, particularly to address accommodations due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conclusion
The combination of child welfare competency and relevant classroom and field experiences contributes to students’ confidence and readiness to work in child welfare. In particular, key elements in quality field placements that jumpstart students’ professional development in child welfare as well as integrate them into agency culture should be included in the design of field models. These university and agency partnerships provide innovative child welfare classroom and field education that effectively develop social work students into prepared and competent child welfare practitioners.