BackOverview: The Placements tool - for organising work experience

*** QUICK LINKS TO USEFUL MATERIALS ***

Our best practice guides for everything to do with Placements can be accessed by anyone here: https://www.unifrog.org/placement/guides (no Unifrog login needed). 

LAUNCHING
- Student launch slides
- Parent/caregiver letter
- Parent/caregiver launch slides

EVERYTHING ELSE
- The legals explained
- Guide for ‘regular’ teachers who are helping out with placements
- The work experience journal
- Placement induction checklist

IN THIS GUIDE

1 - WHAT IS THE PLACEMENTS TOOL?

2 - WHAT IS A PLACEMENT?

3 - HOW DOES THE PLACEMENTS TOOL WORK?

4 - FAQs

1 – WHAT IS THE PLACEMENTS TOOL?

In a nutshell

In 3 bullet points, this is what the Placements tool is:

• A series of forms which need to be completed by specific people at specific times. As soon as one person fills in a form, the next person gets notified, so the whole process runs smoothly and automatically.
   
• Woven through it are explanations of technical terms, plus best practice guidance. Teachers have a dashboard so that they can see at-a-glance the status of every placement for students in a year group.
   
• At the end of each placement, we ask the employer if they are up for hosting another student in the future. This creates a tailored database for your school/college of employers who are up for hosting placements.

This short video sums up the Placements tool – it's a great place to start if you want a quick overview:

The lifecycle of a placement on the placements tool

1. A student (or their teacher) gets the ball rolling by adding a new placement;
2. The employer is notified by email, and they confirm that they follow best practices in:
   1. Safeguarding;
   2. Health and safety;
   3. Risk Assessment;
   4. Insurance;
   5. GDPR;
3. The parent/caregiver signs an agreement;
4. The placement coordinator reviews all the information provided by each party, and gives their consent.
5. Teachers have an overview of the status of all the placements at their school/college. They can filter to see which placements have forms outstanding, and nudge people who need to be chased.
6. The placement takes place; teachers can record a check-in if they want;
7. The student and employer reflect on the placement after it is finished. The employer can choose to add themselves to the school / college’s placements database.

Best practice guidance

These best practice guides are for students, employers, parents/caregivers and teachers; they cover every aspect of attending, hosting, and managing placements. They can be shared with anyone involved – even if they do not have a Unifrog account!

2 – WHAT IS A PLACEMENT?

Is it a genuine placement, or is it a webinar/event/course?

Other names for placements are work experience, WEX, work shadowing, internships. 

If you don't have direct contact with the employer – e.g. the employer is putting on a course or event for lots of students and there’s not much direct interaction between you and the employer – then we consider that a course/event/webinar, and not a placement. In this case, you can record on Unifrog on the Activities tool that you've done the course, but it’s not appropriate to use the Placements tool for this.

Here are our criteria for what we consider a placement:

• You need to be in direct contact with the employer
• You will normally do a bit of work shadowing and some of their own project work that relates to what the employer does
• They should have more of an educational aspect to them than a normal job, but you can be doing real work for the employer
• They can be paid or unpaid, though if you're doing a significant amount of ‘real’ work for the employer, then you should definitely be paid

In person or virtual?

If you're doing a genuine placement rather than attending an event/webinar/course (see above), the tool allows for a placement to be either virtual (i.e. it’s completely remote), or in person (note: if there is any in-person activity at all, it should be considered ‘in person’)

For virtual placements:

• There’s no need for the parent/caregiver agreement, the school permission, or the school check-in forms.
• Some of the questions are different; for example, in the Employer initial form we don’t ask about employer’s liability insurance.
• The tool gives the employer different best practice guidance, for example it tells employers to get familiar with this guide on communicating online.
• After the student has added the virtual placement, and the employer has filled in their initial form, the system sends the school/college placement coordinator an email letting them know that the virtual placement is taking place, allowing them to intervene if necessary.

3 – HOW DOES THE PLACEMENTS TOOL WORK?

The Placements tool is essentially a series of forms that have to be filled in one after another. Each time one is completed, the person who filled in the form gets a confirmation that they’ve done it, and the next person who needs to fill in a form gets an email notification.

When (and how) should a student add a placement?

To start the process on the Placements tool, the first step is for the student to add the placement to the tool.

However, before adding a placement to the placements tool, you should first agree their placement with the employer, for example by email or over the phone.

When you are ready to add the placement, you can find the Placements tool just like any other student tool, via a tile on your homepage.

After you fill in the ‘Student initial form’ to get the ball rolling, the system automatically emails the employer inviting them to fill in the ‘Employer initial form’. If the employer isn’t expecting this email, they probably won’t be best pleased!

Two pro tips: 

• If it’s necessary, teachers can add placements on a student’s behalf. They do this from a student’s profile on the teacher side. Afterwards the process continues as normal.
• Parents who log in as a student (using the option on their parent accounts) cannot add new placements. This is so that they can't try to add placements on their child's behalf (which used to happen, causing a lot of confusion!)

What forms are sent and when? 

This table shows the forms that make up the placements tool, including which forms are used only for in person placements (if you are a teacher and really want to get into it, you can find a list of the questions in each form here). 

Some email tips

All the forms are sent by email, so it’s really important that everyone involved in a placement has the right email entered for them, and that everyone checks their email. To help avoid issues:

• We show each person involved everyone else’s email addresses;
• If anyone involved says they aren't getting the automated emails that the system generates, they should check their junk folders, and add noreply@unifrog.org to their safe sender list / whitelist.
• If one of the automated emails the system sends bounces back:
  • We show this to students and teachers with a big warning at the top of their dashboards
  • We explain to teachers why an email has failed (e.g., we show if the email address doesn't exist at all)
  • As long as they have opted ‘in’ to the ‘Daily Summary’ email (check ‘Settings’ on your Unifrog account!) teachers receive a notification if an email for a placement for which they are a coordinator has failed.

What do the emails look like?

All of the automated emails, whoever they are going to, look quite similar. Here’s an example (at the very end of this guide we show copies of all the emails we send):

Students and teachers can send nudges

Where are the nudge buttons?

• When teachers sort the Advanced view of the Manage page by one of the placement options, for each placement they see one-click buttons to send these nudge emails if it's possible to send them.
• Both students and teachers have buttons to send nudge emails when they go to an individual placement's profile.

We don't want people to be hammered by emails(!), so here are the rules for what re-sending students can do:

• To employer: You've been invited to host a [In-person/Virtual] Placement (re-send possible every 3 days)
• To parent/caregiver: You've been invited to agree to an In-person Placement for XYX (re-send possible every 2 days)
• To school/college placement coordinator: In-person Placement for XYZ that needs your permission to go ahead (re-send possible every 2 days)

The system is rejecting an email address – what can I do?

Sometimes when someone tries to add an email address to a form in the Placements tool, the system says that the email address cannot be added:To our knowledge, across the tens of thousands of forms that have been created, the system has never rejected a correctly entered, legitimate email address. 

Here is the process to go through to troubleshoot an email address that has been rejected by a form:

1. Check that there are no spaces at the beginning or end of the email address.
2. Check the email address in an email checker like this one.
3. Try to add a placement yourself with the relevant email address in your dummy student account
4. Tell us and we can search for the email address in Unifrog's database of email addresses that we've attempted to send emails to. Sometimes we'll find that the relevant email address has previously unsubscribed from Unifrog emails (in which case we can remove the block), or you'll see that the email address has been flagged for spamming (in which case there's nothing we can do about it, and a you'll need to use a new email address).

How can you track the placement forms?

After you have added a placement, you can see the status of your placement by going to the Placements tool via the tile on your homepage.

How can parents/caregivers stay in the loop? 

Parents/caregivers can stay in the loop about a placement in two ways: 

1. We send them email notifications when they’ve successfully completed a form, when they need to fill in a new form, when all the forms to set up a placement have been completed, and also one to remind them that a placement is happening imminently.
2. If they have a parent account with Unifrog, they can use it to see:
   1. the status and what is entered in the before-placement forms (except the details their child has entered in the student initial form if they've said they have special needs, illnesses, or injuries), and
   2. the status of the during and post placement forms 

The logbook

For placements lasting longer than a week, the logbook allows students to record the hours that they've done each week, and it asks the employer to confirm these hours.

You can read more about how the logbook works here (if you're a teacher) or here (if you're a student).

• Switching the logbook on
  
  A teacher (normally the placement coordinator) chooses to switch on the logbook in the Permission form. This option only appears for placements lasting longer than week, that are in-person, and that have an end date. 
  
  A placement does not need to be part of a T-level to have the logbook switched on.
  
  If you are a teacher that wants to add a logbook for a placement that doesn’t have an end date (ie it’s been added by the student as ‘Ongoing’), first add an end date by editing the Student initial form; afterwards the option to add a logbook will appear in the Permission form. You can adjust the end date later if you need to.
  
  Teachers can add a logbook even after a placement has started - the system will automatically create logbooks for each week between the start and end dates.
   
• Advanced view of the Manage page
  
  On the Advanced view of the Manage page, there are two sorting options particularly relevant for placement with logbooks: Placements: By hours (shows all placements with a logbook switched on), and Placements: T-levels by hours (shows only placements associated with a T-level with a logbook switched on).
  
  From these sorting options, teachers can send students and employers one-click nudge emails if there are weeks where they’re missing a student record / an employer confirmation. There are also two filters for logbooks within the ‘Placement Forms’ filter menu.
   
• The Placements page of a student’s profile on the teacher side
  
  When a teacher clicks into the Placements page of a student’s profile, for a placement with the logbook switched on, they can:
  • See all the relevant info about the logbook
  • Edit logbook entries themselves
  • Send chaser emails to both the student and the employer
    
     

4 – FAQs

Does the tool help with finding placements?

Yes. When an employer hosts a student for a placement organised using the Unifrog Placements tool, they are asked in both the Employer initial form (before the placement) and in the Employer feedback form (after the placement) if they are up for joining the Unifrog Placements contacts database. This database is one of the views of the Manage page on the teacher side. If you are a teacher, read about the Placements contacts database here.

I'm concerned about Insurance, Health & Safety, Risk Assessment, and Safeguarding!

We are too, and in fact this is the main reason why we have built the Placements tool. The tool is designed to make it easy for the placement host to get all the relevant paperwork together, and – on the other side of the table – for the school/college to satisfy themselves that everything is in place.

The tool is very thorough in asking the student, employer, and parent/caregiver for information about the student, the employer, and the placement itself, so that all the risks can be discovered, and so that appropriate risk mitigation can be put in place. This includes the employer uploading their Employers' Liability Insurance certificate, Health & Safety policy, and Risk Assessment into the tool, so that all the other parties can view them. The tool also gives all parties best practice guidance for having a safe and successful placement.

If an employer cannot upload required items into the forms (perhaps because our document uploader is blocked by their firewall, or they can't find the necessary document at that moment), they can opt to instead email the documents to the placement coordinator. The system also allows employers who do not possess the normal documents at all (for example, because they are sole traders) to bypass the uploading requirement – in this case the fact that they've done this is flagged to all parties.

For placements outside the UK, the sections for insurance, Health & Safety, and Risk Assessment are phrased differently, to allow for how things are organised in different jurisdictions.

Find everything you need to know about placements and Insurance, Health & Safety, Risk Assessment, and Safeguarding in our guide Placements: the legals explained.

What about a student's special needs, illnesses, or injuries that might affect a placement?

On the ‘Student initial form’, the student selects whether they have any special needs, illnesses or injuries that might affect the placement. If they say ‘Yes’, they have a space to provide details. Parents/caregivers cannot see the details added by the student. If a student has said ‘Yes’, the employer has to show that their Health & Safety policy and Risk Assessment provides for the student's particular situation.

In the ‘Parent/caregiver agreement’ the parent/caregiver is asked if the student has any special needs, illnesses or injuries that are relevant to the placement. Any details they give are flagged to the school/college placement coordinator, and to the employer. 

We keep any information about special needs, illnesses or injuries that is added by the student confidential from the parent/caregiver, and similarly we keep information on this topic that is added by the parent/caregiver confidential from the student. Why? Because this is best practice when it comes to encouraging students, and parents/caregivers, to communicate this important but sensitive information.

After a form is saved, who can edit it?

The system tracks all the edits that are made to the forms, and teachers can see a log of exactly who made what changes and when: they can see the log in the Daily Feed here, and they can also see a log at the bottom of the Placements page in each student’s profile on the teacher side. 

If someone makes edits to a form after it has been saved we do not send automated notification emails (which could be very confusing), but we do prompt the person who has made changes to notify relevant people about what changes they've made.

Here is who can edit what:

• Students can edit most of the Student initial form until the Employer initial form is completed, and they can edit some elements (like the placement end date, the time commitment and the placement address) right up to the start date of the placement.
   
• Employer placement leads can edit this information on the Employer initial form until the Parent/caregiver agreement is completed:
  • Name of placement business/organisation
  • Placement start date
  • Placement end date
  • Describe the time commitment
  • Employer placement lead: name
  • Employer placement lead: email
  • Placement address
  • Placement postcode/zip code
  • Is this the workplace where you'll be based throughout the placement
     
• Parents/caregivers can edit their own name and their email address up until the school consent form is completed. They can also update certain elements of their form even after the school has given permission, such as their telephone number and whether their child has special needs, and they can continue to do so up to 60 days after the start of the placement.
   
• Placement coordinators and teachers with editing permissions can edit most of the fields that appear in the Student initial form, and all the fields in the Employer initial form. 
  
  These teachers can make most edits at any point – even if the placement has already started (though in these cases, we show them nice big warnings that the placement has started).
  
  There are two ways for Placement coordinators and teachers with editing permissions to edit the Employer initial form, both of which are on the placements page of a student’s profile on the teacher side:
  1. To make minor edits, there is an ‘Edit’ button.
  2. To edit any field (including editing documents that have been uploaded, like an insurance certificate), they have the link to the original Employer initial form.

Virtual placements: why doesn't the parent/caregiver or placement coordinator need to give consent/permission?

When administering placements you have to balance the need to do appropriate checks with the need to make the process straightforward. 

For virtual placements, after the employer fills in their initial form, the placement coordinator is sent an email telling them about the placement, meaning they can intervene if necessary. The system does not require the parent/caregiver to complete a consent form, or the placement coordinator to complete a permission form.

This way, the school can always stop a placement from happening if they want to, but the system doesn't create work that doesn't need to be done.

We designed this workflow having talked to many experienced school and college placement coordinators, plus employers, students, parents/caregivers, and carefully taking into account guidance from the UK's Health & Safety Executive.