The student will require to evidence, from his/her practice, progress towards meeting both the practice requirements and value requirements as detailed in the Direct Practice module outline. For the interim report, the student should demonstrate progress towards meeting the necessary competences by the end of the placements, whereas, within the final report, there should be evidence that all practice and value requirements, determined for Direct Practice 1 and 2, have been met.
A suggested format for interim and final reports could be the write up of 3/4 pieces of work. (N.B. for DP1 interim reports, normally two pieces of work should be sufficient). This should be analytical and reflective and not descriptive of the work undertaken. It is anticipated that the work selected would provide a spread of experience which would allow the student to demonstrate the progress towards (Interim stage) or competence (Final stage) in respect of the requirements. Should this work not cover all the requirements then further pieces of work could be used to show demonstration of competence. While the student may use the same pieces of work at the interim and final stages, it is expected that the development of the work will be evident at the final stage.
Value requirements must, be explicitly addressed and interwoven within the pieces of work selected. All work outlined and reflected upon should include a value element. The 6 value requirements should be addressed across the 3/4 pieces of work selected. It is not expected that 6 requirements would be met in any one piece of work. It is suggested that 1-2 requirements be explicitly addressed in each piece of work. To ensure evidence of anti-discriminatory practice is overt, any discriminatory issues should be clearly identified for each piece of work. This should include what the discriminatory issues were, how these were addressed and whether there were difficulties in doing this.
The information provided for demonstration of competence should not be as detailed as is required for the selected piece of work chosen for the integrative practice study, but there should be evidence of the student's use of self, and integration of theory and knowledge in the work undertaken. It would be important that this section of the report is not a descriptive piece of work but rather an interplay of information, evidence of student's competence, and a sense of how the student operated in practice. It should be noted that readers of placement reports do not have access to the IPS and so if using work from the IPS this must be summarised.
The evidence provided by the student must demonstrate an understanding of appropriate knowledge and clearly show how this has informed their practice. The style should incorporate critical analysis and reflection on the practice described.
©West of Scotland Consortium for Education and Training in Social Work 2001.