My Placement: Andrew Ellery

15 February 2011 1 min read Careers Social Care

I did my placement last year at Basingstoke College of Technology. I'd worked in statutory social work before and wanted to try somewhere a bit different. I was the first social work student to have a placement there.

I worked within the college's student services and started by getting to know some of the students by visiting their activist groups. There, I could get to know what really challenges them and gets them shouting about things.

The placement taught me the scale of the issues some college students are dealing with. The students ranged from those who had been involved in the criminal justice system, to those who had perhaps at some point needed protection. They're at that transition age, where a lot of them would not pass the threshold to be eligible for statutory services.

These are guys who in the past may have fallen through the net and been left with no support. They were really trying to grow up and be adult, but some were struggling because they had been affected by their experiences.

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