Episode 5: Placement Equity with Amani Bell and Lachlan Sibir

In this episode, Ebe speaks with Associate Professor Amani Bell (University of Sydney) and Lachlan Sibir (classroom teacher and researcher) about placement equity and placement poverty in Australian higher education.

The conversation explores what placement equity means and why it matters for students from equity-deserving backgrounds. We discuss the strengths and limitations of the Commonwealth Prac Payment, which currently supports students in education, nursing, and social work but excludes many other degree programmes that also require extensive unpaid placements.

The episode examines the intersection of placement poverty with Indigenous student support and other equity initiatives, before diving into practical solutions such as flexible placement models, payment structures based on year level, and strengths-based approaches. We challenge the difference between framing placement support as welfare versus recognising the labour students contribute to organisations, and share insights on designing inclusive and accessible placement experiences that work for all students.

Throughout, the conversation challenges the idea that "this is how it's always been done" and explores concrete ways to make placements equitable without students having to choose between financial survival and completing their degrees.

Episode resources:

• ACSES Fellowship Report: Addressing placement inequities via participatory action research
• The team’s literature review on global approaches to ameliorating placement poverty
• Australian Council of Deans of Health Sciences Report 
• Information about the Commonwealth Prac Payment
• ADCET resources on Inclusive fieldwork, work placements, excursions and practicums
• Paid Placements Aotearoa 
• Students Against Placement Poverty 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:09 Setting the scene: what is placement equity?
• 7:05 Key findings from the research
• 12:26 The Commonwealth Prac Payment
• 23:09 Levers for change
• 31:45 Designing inclusive placement experiences
• 33:56 What's making you hopeful?
• 37:20 Outro

Transcript

Introduction

Ebe Ganon: Welcome back to the Higher Hopes podcast. This is Ebe, and today we're going to be talking about all things practicals, placements, and work integrated learning.

With the recent and long-awaited launch of the Commonwealth Prac Payment, which aims to address the issue of poverty and inequity for students completing unpaid placements in education, nursing, and social work, there has been a lot of focus on the experiences of students in practical and work integrated settings. 

For universities around Australia, practical and work integrated learning and assessment are used across a variety of degree programmes for students at a range of different study levels. But do students experience these opportunities equitably? And what happens when we make students undertake hundreds of unpaid working hours in a cost of living crisis? And what can be done to ensure that all learners are best enabled to succeed in these settings?

I have two excellent experts with me today who've recently published some very unique and innovative research on the topic of placement poverty and placement equity.

Amani Bell is Associate Professor at the University of Sydney School of Health Sciences. She focuses her research on increasing accessibility and success for equity-deserving university students. Co-editor of the books Using Social Theory in Higher Education and Understanding Experiences of First Generation University Students, Amani has practical and research experience spanning equity in higher education, professional learning for educators, and student-staff partnership initiatives. She recently completed an Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success fellowship addressing placement inequities through participatory action research. The project explored solutions to combat placement poverty and to ensure an equitable experience for all students undertaking placements.

Lachlan Sibir is a classroom teacher with a strong background in research focused on Indigenous education and student equity. He completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours at the University of Sydney and a Bachelor of Teaching/Bachelor of Arts (Humanities) at the Australian Catholic University. Lachlan recently worked as a research assistant under Amani for the ACSES fellowship. 

Amani and Lachlan, welcome to Higher Hopes. It's great to have you both.

Setting the scene: what is placement equity?

Ebe: I'm going to start with you, Amani. I'm hoping you could tell us a little bit about yourself and maybe explain what placement equity means for those who've never heard of it.

Amani Bell: I've worked in higher education for quite a long time, and in the most recent years I've been working in the area of work integrated learning, and especially student placements in allied health. That's a really big part of their degrees - around a quarter of their degrees is on these compulsory full-time placements. When the students go on those placements, they usually can't work their regular part-time jobs. As well, some placements are far from home, so students have to factor in travel time and costs, and also finding and paying for accommodation. Then on top of that, some students have caring responsibilities and health issues. And then also some students may encounter racism and discrimination.

So I'm really keen that all placements are equitable so that all students, especially from equity-deserving backgrounds, can have safe, supportive placements where they don't have that financial stress or any discrimination or other barriers.

Ebe: I'm going to move to Lachlan. Can you unpack a little bit why you use the phrase "equity-deserving students"? 

Amani: We see different terms, don't we? We might see students from minoritised backgrounds or students from equity backgrounds. But I think it's helpful to frame it as equity-deserving so that we really focus our attention on students - for example, who are Indigenous, who are from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, low SES, international students, any students who are facing additional barriers. I just think we need to really recognise that they deserve equitable access to higher education.

Ebe: I quite like that it stops us from labelling students with a noun or making "equity students," as we often say, into this kind of collectivised, homogenous group.

Lachlan, can you tell us a bit about you and what made you interested in joining a project with Amani about placement equity?

Lachlan Sibir: A bit about me - I'm a classroom teacher. I teach at a Year 11 and 12 school, so only HSC really. It's usually a lot of content to get through. I've also had various research roles as a uni student - as a research intern looking at Indigenous education, and then more recently with Amani on the fellowship.

I think the thing that got me interested in this project was being a teacher and going on teacher placements. I personally didn't struggle because I live at home still and my parents still support me lots, but I saw a lot of my peers struggle, especially the ones that didn't live at home or had to work 30, 40 hours a week. They were supposed to do that whilst maintaining a full-time teaching load, which to me was quite unfair. I had a friend who had to not drop out but defer their placement for a few weeks to actually work to make money to pay their rent. I was just like, surely there's a better way around this.

I remember at the time I had a chat with one of my placement supervisors - we had two - and we had a whole discussion about this. She was in her fifties and she said, "Well, when I went to uni I was able to do it without a job." I was just like, I think you're missing the point here.

But then that just led me down this whole idea of if there's ever an opportunity to look into this, I'm going to take that opportunity. When I saw Amani's job ad go out in the Gadigal Centre's newsletter, I was like, I'm going to apply. And that's what I did. That's what kind of got me interested on this journey. The rabbit hole went quite deep, you could say. There was so much to it, which I didn't expect.

Ebe: That's awesome. We so often frame some of these conversations around student equity, particularly when we're talking about things like cost of living. It always somehow ends up in this "us and them" conversation of like, "Oh well, you know, 20 years ago I was able to do this," or you've got senior leaders reflecting on their university experience, which is so different to how things are now. But I also think that sometimes those conversations kind of miss the point in that this is what we're dealing with now. This is what the policy settings and the economic conditions look like for us. So let's just move forward from that shared understanding rather than needing to cast back and do this comparison misery Olympics thing.

Key findings from the research

Ebe: Amani, you've recently published the report for your ACSES fellowship. Congratulations. I'll pop a link to that in the show notes because it's a really good read. But for those who are a little more auditory-minded, do you mind sharing what the key findings of the project were and what you think they mean for students and for universities?

Amani: For the project I worked with four student co-researchers. One was Lachlan, and there were three others - Minahil Khan, Tara Soanes, and Tina Tran. Then we worked with a wider group of 74 students and educators across Australia, all of whom had experience of placements themselves and were often advocates and activists and researchers in this area. So it was that real insider research. Together we came up with a lot of solutions to make placements more equitable - we had 40 in total.

Some of the key findings: we found that we need to expand financial support for students on placement. We need to provide flexible placement options, and we also need to take a whole-of-degree approach to work integrated learning, and especially to make sure that placements are more inclusive.

Ebe: Thanks for sharing that. Lachlan, can you tell us a bit more about the role of student leadership and partnership in the project?

Lachlan: I think the student partnership and leadership was quite vital to the project overall in terms of findings and also ideas. With that in mind, it was me - I was a teacher on the project - and we had two social workers, Tina and Tara, and then we had Minahil who was studying dentistry and was also an international student as well. I should say that all of us brought unique perspectives to the research component of it, and we all had our own unique interests. We were able to explore those interests, those passions a bit more. I think that really shined through in our discussions about the research and what was going on.

In terms of running the workshops we did, it was an eye-opener as well to see other students, but to me the bigger eye-opener was educators and university staff also sharing the other side of the equation here. Practitioners that were very interested in equity and ensuring that all students achieve success - seeing the framework that limits them and them trying to take the most realistic approach possible really made me think deeply about this sort of idea of when the findings and the research is published, what's the most practical way to go about it all.

Ebe: It sounds like what you're talking about there is that mutual benefit that happens when we work in partnership models. Because I think we're often very focused on talking about the benefits that flow in one direction or another, but actually it's mutual understanding, it's sharing lived experience for the purpose of building understanding and new knowledge on top of that. I think that is what made this project so unique from my perspective. We often have projects that are student-led or have significant student components that sit in isolation from other parts of research, and being able to bring those things together and also use that to inform the way that practitioners are understanding this content was really, really unique and interesting.

Amani, is there anything that surprised you in the findings or anything that you think might not be getting enough attention when we're talking about placement?

Amani: I think something that deserves more attention - and we've kind of referred to this earlier as well - is for educators and placement sites to get a more in-depth understanding of students' experiences on placement. Students said that they often experience work integrated learning as labour. They said it's like a job and some of the participants even said they were used to fill staffing gaps, and that's echoing the literature as well. So I think it's really important for educators and placements sites to really understand that. Even though they may frame work integrated learning as a learning experience, we need to really challenge assumptions and address them.

Ebe: And Lachlan, what about you? Was there anything that surprised you in what came out of the various workshops?

Lachlan: Like I said, for me it was just more so seeing the other side of what staff and all that have to see with universities. I think it kind of reinforced some ideas I already had because with the placement offices, they were quite understaffed, underfunded as well. It's a very hard situation in terms of changing it and all that sort of stuff. People have all these ideas, but I'm just like, what's practical? What's going to work now? What's going to work in the future? It's very - I don't know, it feels like eating an elephant sort of thing. Is that the right quote? You don't eat it all in one go, you eat it one piece at a time.

I think that's my takeaway - I didn't realise how big it was. Then talking with other disciplines and students, you realise that it's not just in teaching or social work or nursing, it's in also physiotherapy or speech pathology. I think it was the extent - that was the most surprising thing to me. The research, the data does show that this idea that it's not just a few degrees, it is a lot of degrees here.

The Commonwealth Prac Payment

Ebe: The government has recently launched the Commonwealth Prac Payment, which is kind of a policy setting that's been in the works for a little while, where the government are aiming to provide income support to students in particular programmes to support them financially while they're undertaking this compulsory placement. It's covering students in nursing, in social work, in education. But what you just said, Lachlan - it's not just a few students and it's not just students in certain programmes. There's also students doing all kinds of different work integrated learning style assessment and engagements that don't fit into that compulsory practicum definition.

I'm wondering if, Amani, you have a view on the strengths and the weaknesses of the programme, or a sense of what could be improved in this space?

Amani: I think it was a big initiative and a big funding commitment from the federal government. It was a result of a lot of work from student activists, educator advocates, people getting these issues around placement poverty into the media. Unions and politicians were advocating and lobbying as well. So a great start, but I'm concerned that it does exclude international students and it does exclude, as you said, so many degrees. So many more degrees have compulsory full-time placements - medicine, physiotherapy, dentistry, pharmacy, speech pathology, veterinary science, psychology. We could go on and on with the list.

I'm just curious about why just those degrees. Maybe there's an argument that could be made around some of the degrees - for example, medicine. Maybe there's an argument about, "Oh well, when those students graduate as doctors, they'll be earning a really good income, so it doesn't really matter if they're struggling while they're on placement." But medicine have more than 2000 hours of placement and it can really exclude people from even going into that degree. So we are not getting a diverse workforce.

I think it's important to look at that in some way. But the money has to come from somewhere. I know, Ebe, you're an education policy person and you look into it - in the background, there are not unfortunately unlimited pools of money for higher education, and so it has to come from somewhere, and it usually comes from another part of higher education, unfortunately.

Ebe: What you said there is really important, particularly around earning potential post-graduation is one thing, but actually making the process of getting to that point accessible and inclusive and achievable for all students has massive implications on workforce composition on the other end of it. I feel like maybe in other fields we've been hearing these things for over a decade, probably many decades now, around gender composition in STEM-based both degree programmes and also in workforces that result from those. We are talking about what does the learning experience look like to be able to enable and create workforces that represent the diversity of our population.

But it feels like this conversation here is kind of 10 years behind in that we are interested and we want to create medical workforces and teaching workforces that are representative of the clients and the students that they serve and support. But then also we're perhaps missing a really important piece of what that experience looks like on the ground and the journey to get there.

We throw a lot of money at student support programmes in a lot of those degree programmes as well. But I still think that there's a really big gap in the income support piece. Lots of student groups have been advocating and lobbying for many, many years about cost of living support and the level of Youth Allowance and barriers to accessing things like Jobseeker, Youth Allowance, Abstudy - all of those kinds of payments that students will typically access. Issues of independence from parents, means testing of family-based income that is totally divorced from the reality of the way a lot of students experience their studies as they're leaving home or even while they're still living at home.

Lachlan, what do you think? Do you have any thoughts on the Commonwealth Prac Payment and based on what you were hearing from both staff and students, do you think it's hitting the mark in starting to address some of these barriers?

Lachlan: I think it's a start in the right direction for students. But I don't know - it's been more than a couple of months now since we've worked on the fellowship and I've been thinking about this Commonwealth Prac Payment from time to time. It is a good thing, it's a step in the right direction. But I think there's another motive behind it. And this is maybe why I think it's only for teaching, social work, and nursing - these are all areas where there's also job shortages currently, big job shortages. I think that's why those areas now got prioritised a lot more for this payment over medicine, where I don't think there's really a shortage in medicine.

I think there needs to be a big audit done of everything, all this funding, to really see what we can lose and what we can't lose. Because you don't want to be taking money away from something that is important when there's something that hasn't maybe been touched in the last five to 10 years and it's just getting money every year.

Amani: I know the Australian Council of Deans of Health Sciences has put together research around workforce shortages in the allied health professions as well. So I think we can still make the argument for other degrees. And I think we need to look at nuances about shortages in rural and regional areas - whether prac payments are a solution or does that need a different type of solution around supporting people from those rural and regional areas to enter those professions because they're the ones likely to stay there.

Ebe: Another argument I've heard in this space is social work, nursing, teaching - these are all quite highly feminised professions. And there are quite high volumes of students with significant caring responsibilities, with much more complex financial pictures in their lives. Certainly a lot of the political discourse around this has really been about targeting students of greatest need and really about alleviating poverty, which was a big focus in your research and in your project. So I think certainly it's starting to get at some of those areas of greatest need, but we're still kind of in this - I suppose it feels like crisis control rather than proactive promotion of equity and fair and inclusive and accessible learning experiences.

Lachlan, you made an interesting comment at the end there when you were talking about what are the things that we really can't afford to lose, and perhaps some of the areas that maybe haven't had as much focus or investment in higher education policy or student support programmes. Did you have anything in mind in particular there that you wanted to talk about?

Lachlan: I don't know, it's a very hard thing because universities are so big and I'm sure there's money going to all different places. But I feel like universities at the moment are doing well - and I'm speaking here as an Aboriginal man - in regards to the Indigenous support, for instance. I'm going to use this example here because I know it quite well. If doing something like these prac placements takes away money given towards Indigenous units or - I hate it - Indigenous Higher Education Units, is what the fancy university term is, I guess - that's going to take away a lot of opportunity from students who are Aboriginal, maybe first in the family to go to university, to actually succeed.

I feel like universities and governments in that regard need to take that into account here when looking at where the money's coming from for these Commonwealth Prac Payments. Because if you're taking money away from another group that is also doing amazing things, is there going to be suffering on the other end as well?

Ebe: That makes a lot of sense and I really hope that the government doesn't see the way that they evolve their policy settings over time as kind of a zero-sum game, right? Because I think we can support students across a range of different settings in a range of different ways.

Do you think there's anything in particular in the Indigenous student support space that's working really well that other parts of the support ecosystem could learn from and solutions that have been created in that space that might be able to be expanded or leveraged?

Lachlan: I can speak from a few unis here. I'm currently also working back at ACU doing a tutorial, teaching tutorial for away-from-base students. Basically students come in from all over Australia who are Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, and they come in for classes a couple of times a year. So it's like intensive blocks. I really think that without something like that, a lot of people in rural and remote Australia can't get their degrees. I know they're doing a lot now in regional New South Wales with the new study hubs and they're amazing. I saw that recently.

But with this away-from-base programme - and going back to that - a lot of money has been allocated towards Indigenous funding to run those units. In this instance here, we have students coming from the Cape York, the very top of Australia, down to become teachers. That's largely due to the funding and the effort. Stuff like that is very important because they'll also get to do their placements in their schools in community, and it's a very culturally safe and appropriate environment for them to do their studies.

I had the task of having to do Indigenous Histories, Cultures, and Embedding that in Education - that was the unit I had to teach. Someone who was younger than pretty much all of their students in this instance as well - it was only a few that I was actually older than - it was something that at the end, I felt quite happy that it was a culturally safe, culturally appropriate environment. Because that's what I wanted for them. And not to have it as something that came to me with other university academics saying they weren't really culturally safe or they weren't appropriate. I think this programme is very good at ensuring that all students have an equitable go.

Levers for change

Ebe: Amani, what do you think the biggest lever for change or the biggest potential shift we could make to improve the experiences of students in practicals and in placements?

Amani: I think one of the biggest things we can do - and it may sound too simple - I think bringing in more flexibility to placements. So having placements that are part-time, not full-time, so that students can still work their jobs, they can still take care of their own wellbeing and they might have caring responsibilities for others. Having shorter days. Flexibility around when placements start. And then having some kind of innovations around what can count towards placement competency. So can students bring in the skills that they've learned in their volunteering or in their previous or current paid jobs? Can that all somehow count towards competency so there's not so much to focus on? Rather than, "Well, this has got to be a set number of full-time hours," be much more flexible.

Again, I have heard arguments about, "Oh no, they need - they have to be full-time. They've always been full-time. If students don't do a full-time placement, how do we know that they're ready to enter the profession as a full-time worker?" And I just think entering the profession itself is soon enough to be a full-time worker. And maybe some students don't want to be a full-time worker anyway. They might prefer some kind of part-time work arrangements. So I just think flexibility across the board for placements would be good.

Ebe: It's a really good point and points to a bigger challenge that I see in a lot of different settings, whether it's in admission to different degree programmes or in the provision of adjustments, particularly for students with disability - this strange argument that gets wheeled out which goes something like, "We can't provide this in the university context because when students get to the real world, it's not going to be like that."

I think there's a couple of problems there, right? It firstly assumes that all students have the goal to go and immediately transition into a conventional, full-time, traditional position in that specific occupation, which is not always the case. Even if they do, it assumes that that workplace or that position itself is not complying with expectations of workplaces that require workplaces to provide adjustments to their workers in the same way that we have obligations in the education sector to provide adjustments to people with disability. Workplaces have the same obligations.

So this whole logic of "we can't do this because that's not what it's like in the real world" either reflects a concerning personal experience for that individual where for whatever reason they've experienced very inaccessible and, arguably, unlawful workplaces, or something else a little bit more troubling, I suppose, around the kinds of cultural expectations that people have about who belongs in certain workforces. Which goes back to what you're both talking about in terms of workforce composition, right? Worker shortages is one thing, but shortages in particular cohorts and making sure that we have workforces that are fully representative of the diversity of people in our population.

Perhaps there are maybe some of these professions that on the face of things, it looks like, "Yep, we've got enough people there." But when you actually look at who those people are, there are huge swathes of our student cohorts and population cohorts that are missing. There are lots of workforces where people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds are underrepresented and where people with disability are underrepresented, where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are underrepresented. So perhaps while there's enough people to fill the jobs, we're missing some really important perspectives there.

Lachlan, what do you think about those big policy, cultural change, blue-sky things that might be able to shift here based on your experience and what you've found in the project?

Lachlan: I think flexibility is probably also the biggest lever for students. However, the thing it doesn't really account for is burnout in that instance. Because if students are working three days unpaid time and then another three, four days paid time, then it's like they're working a full seven days, probably pushing themselves a bit too much. So short-term, I see this idea of flexibility being a great thing, but I think in the long term, there's better ways to go about that flexibility route.

I saw this one during our initial research - that some universities offer a payment scheme, or you could say structure, for students during their placements depending on what year they're at. So if they're in their second year doing their placement, they get paid at 50% of a full-time wage. If they're in their third year, it's paid at 80%. To me, if we could really focus on doing something similar here in Australia, that would be the way to go about it.

In teaching there is what they call the NESA Waiver B, which means on your last placement you can get paid the same salary as a full-time teacher if you work a 0.8 load or four days a week. We should then apply that to everything else. I'm thinking of teaching - if you do a second or third year placement, you're usually working at a 0.6 load or a 0.5 load of two and a half, three days a week. You should be employed by the school and getting paid there. There's funding there for that. I think long-term, that will be the way to really have students stay and succeed.

Because I know, I'm speaking from my teacher experience here, we have to prep a lot of lessons. I know that if I'm working during my placement, I'm not going to prep good lessons. And I could see it being applied to so many other things. I know social work have massive 500 or two 500-hour placements. Having a system in place when they're doing these placements - let's just say 60% of a wage - would be a lot better than the Commonwealth Prac Payment. It provides students the opportunity to get paid for what they're doing so they're not stressed out about money and all that sort of stuff, which really affects them. So in terms of what I want to see as the biggest change, I think having a payment structure in play would help out lots and do lots for students in the long run.

Amani: We did a literature review on how to address placement poverty, and we looked at the OECD countries. We did find a bunch of different models. So there are apprenticeship degrees or known as sandwich or co-op degrees where students do paid placements through their degree. There are some downsides - the degree may take a little longer. But there is that model. There is the tax incentive model where the government will give tax incentives to employers who are paying students for placement. In the UK they were doing free degrees for some health professions and things. So yeah, there's lots of different models that are worth exploring.

Ebe: I never want to make this a whinge, but I think one of the biggest problems that I have with the Prac Payment is that it has been framed as welfare. And one of the key eligibility pathways that students can use is them being in receipt of an existing social security payment. For university students, obviously they'll be paid by their university, but it's not a wage. And what that points to is a devaluation of the labour that students perform for organisations. Often publicly funded organisations, schools, whatever that might be.

What you were talking about there, Lachlan, in terms of being able to work on a scaled salary system or a provided salary system, is fundamentally different there because that is recognising the labour and the contribution that students are making in these environments. I think about medicine as an example. Hospitals would fall over without unpaid student labour. They wouldn't work. They rely on the existence of that human capital there in order to be able to function. Schools vary, it seems a little bit, in the way that they use student teachers, but certainly in some settings they're being used to pick up workforce shortages. They're being used to pick up resourcing that perhaps hasn't been provided.

Whether we want to call it exploitation or not, I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole today, but certainly for me the long-term goal here - and hopefully it doesn't have to be long-term - is that we actually recognise that students on practicals and in work integrated learning settings provide significant value to organisations, to businesses, and particularly those operating in publicly funded models or in sort of profit-making models. I have a really big problem with the fact that it becomes the government's responsibility to pay effectively welfare to students performing labour that would otherwise be paid for by a business or by a company or an organisation.

Designing inclusive placement experiences

Ebe: I know there will be a lot of people listening who have seen the title of the episode and are really keen to hear some very practical and discrete tips about designing inclusive, accessible placement experiences. I know that was an area that the project covered a little bit. Amani, I'm wondering if you've got a couple of principles-based tips around designing those learning experiences and placements so that they recognise the full diversity of the strengths and support needs of the students who complete them?

Amani: I think there needs to be a strengths-based approach to designing placements. So we recognise that students from equity-deserving backgrounds have a lot of strengths that they bring to those placement experiences. And so I think that should start through the whole degree - those kind of discussions in the university with students and educators learning how to respond when they do encounter instances of discrimination and racism and so on, whether that's towards themselves or a peer or a colleague, or to a client or a patient. Making sure we all have a few strategies of how to stand up and what to do.

Then bring that into the professions so that when those students become professionals and placement educators themselves, they're bringing that awareness to making sure that the student placement experience is safe and inclusive. Because we know that that's the best environment for learning. I don't think anyone learns well when they're feeling scared and challenged and stressed. That kind of fear-based approach really doesn't work. So I think if we start with this kind of newer generation, and then we also try to keep working with - there are a lot of amazing educators out there. I'm not saying that everyone is providing some kind of horrible experience. It just still happens too much.

And then I think just learning from all the amazing resources that are out there. I know, Ebe, you do incredible work in this area and many others as well. So there's kind of no excuse - all the information and resources are there and we need to keep learning.

Ebe: Thanks, Amani.

What's making you hopeful?

Ebe: Lachlan, lastly, what is making you feel hopeful for the higher education sector at the moment, this week, this month, or right now?

Lachlan: I think one thing I do feel hopeful about is that there are people in the roles that do genuinely care and have the ability to make changes. I think I saw this at the symposium. I had feedback from my colleague at ACU - apparently another uni was trying to poach me. They were also taking the advice on, and I think that with that in mind, everyone's kind of talking to each other here.

I think that really makes me feel hopeful because a lot of these changes to staff I've seen with universities are coming in and they're set on making this change. I think obviously change takes forever. I'm a history nerd and revolutions take many years, and they're supposedly a fast thing. So we can't really expect these changes to be rapid. They're going to take many years. I am happy to wait out those many years of change if they're going to be better in the long run for students. I know also living at a group right now that probably aren't experiencing the best experience ever, but it's all for the betterment of society later on.

I think that's what makes me feel hopeful for higher education moving forward - this idea that people are going in trying to change and then doing the best that they can to make these changes.

Ebe: Really wise advice for student leaders in particular, because I think a lot of us get really impatient sometimes with some of these big picture systemic changes. Like you said, that's not to minimise the experience of students who are coming up against these barriers now. And that's why some of these practical, immediate, and short-term solutions are important, and how the Prac Payment kind of goes some way to addressing that for some students is really important. But also sometimes we need to be patient and wait for decision-making to catch up with the knowledge that we are creating as students and as researchers and as practitioners. Sometimes it takes a lot longer than we'd like. But we do see some of these changes coming through. Something like the Prac Payment wouldn't have happened five years ago - there was no kind of authorising environment for something like that. There was no appetite to make that kind of change. But slowly, slowly we push forward.

Amani, what about you?

Amani: The amazing people in the sector, both students and educators. I met so many incredible people through the course of this project. So of course the student co-researchers - Lachlan, Minahil, Tara, and Tina. And then I came across other amazing student activists like yourself, Ebe. Bex Howells from Paid Placements Aotearoa - she was doing her master's thesis on placement poverty at the time. Here in Australia, the Students Against Placement Poverty. So there are so many people who've been working in this area for a long time, making these changes possible. That's what I feel hopeful about - continuing those kind of partnerships so that we all understand each other's perspectives and also unpack the barriers and how we can address them.

Outro

Ebe: A massive thank you to both Amani and Lachlan for their time today and their continuing work to ensure that no student is left behind. In the show notes, you will find some links to their recent research report and their other work, as well as to some resources that might help you learn a little bit more about designing and delivering equitable and accessible practicals and work integrated learning.

I'd love to hear more about what you think is the next step in policy or practice when it comes to practice placements and work integrated learning. If there's something we've missed here, or a pocket of great practice that you'd like to highlight, head to higherhopespod.com. Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram or jump into the comment section on Substack to share your thoughts.

If you're keen to back this project, please head over to Higher Hopes by Ebe Ganon on Substack, which you can find via higherhopespod.com. There are various paid and free ways you can support this work, including by leaving a rating and review to help other people discover this platform.

Until next time, keep dreaming bigger, keep building better, and stay hopeful.

The Higher Hopes podcast is produced on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. I pay my respects to elders past and present, as well as to any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people listening today. Sovereignty was never ceded, and this acknowledgement extends to wherever you are listening from. I encourage you to learn about the traditional custodians of your own country. It's our job to support First Nations perspectives and knowledge in the higher education sector as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the original teachers, learners, and researchers on this land.