New plans at Manchester Uni: compulsory work placements and doing away with ‘traditional content delivery’

[BlossomBlossomBlossom]

Aka ‘lectures’

University will make all students go on work placement

https://www.thetimes.com/article/0095e04e-4307-453c-a964-06ffcbe1e712?shareToken=6677ef624558a383f9dda5fd72f7fc3d

Wonder how quickly these ideas will spread to other institutions.

We find them far more effective than a lecture. We still use the same 'experts' and teach the same content.
To some extent it will be subject specific but I work in an education department and we know that from a pedagogical perspective a traditional 'lecture' is the least effective teaching method.

DS couldn't get a placement. Of his group of closest pals on his course, only one got a placement. Will this also impact the jobs available after graduating if employers will fill them with ever rotating cheaper interns?

@BlossomBlossomBlossom Do you know how university placements work at the moment? Dc have to apply for them. The university doesn’t have a bank of them. Many don’t get one. Employers are not offering them as much as they did. Where are they coming from for everyone? It’s almost ludicrous to think this will happen but it’s a decent aim.

My DD did employment workshops, cv writing, application strategy etc etc at university and it resulted in a certificate if you completed the modules.

Manchester uni is a big hitter in Manchester but students from other universities will also want the placements. There are not enough to go round. For many it will end up being who you know, not what you know.

Unless the university somehow has an arrangement with local employers, this won't actually change things. It is a massive struggle for students on existing 'placement year' courses to actually secure placements, internships etc so many of them end up just having to switch to the 3rd year without taking a placement year. Nice ambition to have, in theory, but in practice, where are all these relevant placements going to magically come from?

I do know how they work, @MeetMeOnTheCorner! That’s why I said they’d be useful if it’s so well organised that everyone does get one.

And I agree - in order to source so many placements it would impact the first job after graduation field. (Not grad level but I know of more than one cafe that has a continuous stream of unpaid young people ‘trying out’ for a job. It’s evil! And means someone is being denied a full time, paid job.)

Very large lectures may not be effective but with smaller and mid sized groups and a lecturer who knows how to keep the room engaged, they are absolutely fine

Seminars are not universally effective, again they need to be designed and led in engaging ways.

It's the quality of the educator more than the format of the session that makes the biggest difference IMHO.

It will almost certainly lead to exploitation ,an endless stream of students with no choice doing unpaid jobs very loosely based on their degrees.

Well I'm sure all the nursing students at Manchester who have to do 2,300 hours of placement to graduate will be shrugging their shoulders at this - along with the medics, midwives, dentists, pharmacists etc. I have no idea why this story is deemed worthy of attention when every student at e.g. Loughborough University has been offered the opportunity to take a year in industry for years now. The problem of course will be finding placements for all these students. It's easy to say the possibility is there but completely another thing to make it a reality.

This is true.

@AlohaRose As does Bath but in this day and age, offering a 4 year degree with one of the years out is just what you read on the page. Getting the placements is whole lot more difficult. In many cases impossible.

No university can guarantee anything. It’s not about organisation at the uni - it’s about the lack of placements.

My son is on his year in industry at the moment at it's been incredible for him, lots of people just don't get one though and some universities promise support and it only fits the very confident students.

I'd love to know how they plan to deliver meaningful work experience for everyone.

We can't get GCSE or sixth form students into work experience since covid.

Everywhere is cut to the bone and nobody has the budget or staffing for the 'nice to haves' like showing kids round on a placement and being outreach-y.

When I was at school we did work experience equivalents in Y9, Y10 and Y12. There just aren't the opportunities any more.

So while the idea is glorious, I fear for the reality of the scheme.

Well, quite. There are far too few jobs for graduates as it is, so if every year a business has entry level staff as students on placement, when those students graduate those jobs won't be there for them to take. They'll be being done by the next year's lot of students on placement.

Interesting how the uni plans to fund this. The work and admin that goes into finding nurses placements is astronomical. They are planning to find placements for all students? I doubt it!

I was shocked that ds had to apply for placements as you do a job. The uni gave very little help & a lot of students didn't get them. Luckily, he did but it took ages & I felt awful as I'd actively encouraged him to do a degree with a placement year. I'm not sure where placements will come from for all these students.

I imagine Philosophy students will spend a week chatting to Claude about the meaning of ‘work’?

Took my son 70 applications to get one and students from loads of unis were competing for the same placements. Most don’t get one.

@keepswimming38 That’s not how it works. Mandatory work (nursing) is completely different.

The universities do not find the placements. No universities are doing this. They prepare (?) dc for making applications. Some companies have long standing connections with universities and others just “advertise” with them. Overall there’s nowhere near enough and many dc get nothing after a substantial amount of applications. If Manchester push it back on the students, many will really struggle. Certainly for the 3rd year placements.

Shorter internships are just as bad. They simply aren’t there for everyone. Some dc will blag placements with family friends but it ends up being who you know. Manchester Met students will also want placements so 60,000 in Manchester!

Today, Next have said they get 19 applications on average for every shop job. The work simply isn’t there no matter how useful Manchester think it is!

Ridiculous! There’s no one who’s going to take on all these uni students for work experience. Especially with stricter employment practices coming in next year like no zero hour contracts.

It will not only be difficult finding the placements for undergraduates but also ensuring that they are of sufficient quality for the student to learn useful and transferable skills. I am an ex-academic and host Uni of Manchester masters student placements who come in with a certain level of research experience, mostly honed in their dissertation, but I wouldn’t have the time to sufficiently coach and support an undergraduate and focus on them to the extent uni staff do on a traditional course. I’m not sure of the detail of this proposal but my instinct is to be really skeptical. I’m not sure if undergrads or their hosts will be able to sufficiently benefit from the proposal. Uni of Manchester are very sales/ business savvy and I suspect this is another way of selling their courses to wealthy overseas students and their families. Hope I’m proved wrong.

Practical experience can take many forms. It’s not always a formal placement in a work place.

Lots of universities place a huge emphasis on work integrated learning - it’s not a new concept. I very much doubt this will be all students going a work placement but more an opportunity for students to get some practical experience. That could be working with an employer on a group ‘live’ project, exchange programmes and summer schools or the university itself creating opportunities.

Are these placements and internships going to be paid?

I can see why the unis would push for them, they don’t even have to train the students they’re charging a fortune, just park them out on someone else. Works great in teaching (it often doesn’t).

Do you think a placement, internship or work integrated learning is outsourcing teaching?

Don’t you think it’s beneficial for students to leave with an academic qualification and some experience?

It’s funny, MN loves to slate universities for not preparing young people for the real world and for not offering value for money. Yet when a university looks to address this they get criticised!!

I don’t work for Manchester but do work for a university which works very hard to offer as many students as possible opportunities to gain practical experience and I’m surprised at some of the responses tbh.

My nephew does maths there, just finishing third year and says lecture attendance is (and always has been) minimal.
My son is at another uni doing Chemistry and just finishing third year and going to do a placement for his fourth. He was in the minority to secure one after very many applications, most didn’t.

It can be yes. I believe ive noticed a growing inability to articulate teaching and lessons over the last few decades, replaced by this demand for ‘experience’. As with other skills we are losing the ability to explicitly train and describe processes of learning because it isn’t done very much anymore. Look at self-training books over the last few decades, recently published ones are very poor quality.

In addition you don’t consider my other concerns at all. For the last placements of teaching you can effectively be left to teach the class. There’s experience and then there’s taking the piss.

It would be different if this was happening in the economy of the 60s or even 90s, when the degrees were free, housing costs were proportionate to wages, and there was plenty of employment. But none of those are happening now. How do you propose to fix the economy and make work pay while you are forcing youngsters to pay to work professional jobs?

Whats the point of education now?