Planting the seeds for someone else’s discussion: Experiences of task supervisors supporting social work placements

Abstract

Field Education is pivotal to social work education and requires supervision by a qualified social worker. Student placements with external social work supervision are becoming more prominent, but are generally considered outside the norm and have attracted limited research attention. This paper presents the experiences of task supervisors who supported social work placements, a subset of data from a larger research exploring the experiences of key stakeholders in placements with external or off-site social work supervision in Australia. Task supervisors’ perspectives have rarely been considered in research, leaving their contributions to social work education underexplored. The thematic analysis highlighted three dominant themes: the roles between task supervisors and external supervisors were not always clarified; task supervisors were actively engaged in the supervision of students, but did not necessarily have a relationship with the external or off-site supervisor; and task supervisors were not always involved in the student placement assessment. Participants emphasised the positives of placements with external supervision, but also raised a number of challenges.