Guide to Inducting Student Social Workers

Induction

Induction is intended to support students to develop relationships with colleagues; familiarise themselves with the boroughs culture and values; expose learners to a range of key placement activity, enabling them to develop their theoretical and practical skills; setting out the parameters of the supervisor and supervisee relationship through a supervision agreement, outlining its purpose and benefits.

Suggested tasks

• Access to key policy and procedure and systems such as health and safety protocols, lone working procedures, setting up IT access (Outlook, S drive, Liquid Logic).
• Provide information about general housekeeping: desk space, kitchen, fire exits, room bookings, dates of standardised meetings within you service area, leave arrangements.
• An introduction to the team, information about the borough, the directorate and third sector agencies that your team frequently work with. This could help learners to map the child’s journey, for example where does the MARF go, once it is screened, what are the next steps, what services does the child and family encounter when accessing support.
• Consider using the Honey and Mumford (1986) questionnaire to establish the students learning style, this may will enable you to identify and help plan key learning tasks and work out what works best for their learning style and what they struggle with.
• Identify shadowing opportunities, exposing the student to experiential learning that will enable them to develop their own skills such as Child in Need Assessments or Adult Safeguarding planning meetings etc
• Essential internal training that will enable the learner to develop knowledge pertinent to their role.
• Use your initial supervision to discuss practice models, key legislation used by the team, review the learners’ previous final year report and personal development plan. The latter can then help you benchmark where the student is at and measure and assess progression.