Students offer insights to social worker wellbeing conference

A prestigious conference hosted by the University of Huddersfield has focused on the wellbeing of social workers, with students sharing their placement experiences to help raise awareness of current issues on the frontline.

The annual conference of the National Organisation for Practice Teaching (England) (NOPT) came to the University, bringing social workers, practice educators and academics together to share good practice and assess where improvements can be made.

Students from Huddersfield’s social work undergraduate and postgraduate courses shared insights from their course placements in a round-table session during the conference, which also saw a keynote speech from Dr Pamela Trevithick, Visiting Professor on Social Work at the University of Buckinghamshire.

“NOPT is an organisation that supports and advocates for our practice educators,” says Leeanne Olivant, Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Huddersfield, “and we were delighted that wellbeing for social work would be a main topic when we hosted the NOPT annual conference.

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“Resilience was another theme of the day, and it’s a word that provoked some healthy debate. Having Dr Trevithick speak at the start of the day and hearing her thoughts on wellbeing for social workers was a great way to start, but the round-tables with our students were very productive.

“There were practitioners and educators from all over the country, some very experienced people, in the room and I think they really gained something from interacting with our students. Some of our students have worked before coming to us, others don’t have as much experience but they all had something significant to say about their work placements. 

“It is very challenging for social workers currently, and they are under a lot of pressure. I think that hearing from the students on what it is like for people relatively new to social work was highly valuable, and I hope our students realise that they had many valid things to say that really landed with the delegates.

“There was a mixture of local authority and independent social workers, and social work academics, and I think they all took something away from what Huddersfield’s students had to say.”