What did I learn on my work experience placement at WH Smith?

That books are heavy.

Learning on the job is cool these days. Every time I (virtually) open a newspaper I’m told that instead of paying for their education, young people should get paid instead.

Sometimes, they’re not earning while learning. Deep down near the bottom of the “next steps” annex to its plan to Make Work Pay, the government says that “powers already exist” to deliver its commitment to tightening the ban on unpaid internships.

It says that it will launch a call for evidence on the issue by the end of the year – and there’s not long to go to meet even that commitment.

Of course in theory unpaid internships are already banned – you’re entitled to payment if you’ve agreed to do work for an organisation within a set timeframe and you’ve completed it. But that’s not really how it pans out in practice.

Back in 2017, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility called for a ban on unpaid internships over 4 weeks after hearing evidence on barriers to social mobility.

In April of that year, the Institute for Public Policy Research published a report which provided evidence that internships had increased to around 70,000 a year – and also recommended a ban after 4 weeks.

And Matthew Taylor’s review into employment practices concluded:

It is clear to us that unpaid internships are an abuse of power by employers and extremely damaging to social mobility.

It’s an issue across Europe too – although EU member states can’t seem to agree wording that would tighten things up.

Some of the abuse is about employers pretending that something is an internship when it’s really employment they don’t want to pay for.

Apprentices have to be paid – albeit at a disgracefully lower minimum wage than others in society enjoy.

But formal education enjoys quite a wide exemption. The National Minimum Wage Regulations 2015 say that:

…a person who undertakes a higher education course or further education course, and before the course ends is required, as part of that course, to attend a period of work experience not exceeding one year, does not qualify for the national minimum wage as respects work done for the employer as part of that course.

Hence Labour’s pre-manifesto commitment only went as far as saying that:

Labour will ban unpaid internships except when they are part of an education or training course.

There’s therefore a set of interesting questions about voluntary placements – support to find which is often advertised by universities – which aren’t credit bearing.

Are they really “part of” the course? And is a tightening of the rules or enforcement of them going to make it even harder than it is already to find placements?

In the EU, the Commission’s initial proposal set out principles that member states would have had to apply to prevent jobs from being replaced or disguised as “traineeships”, including the ratio of staff to trainees, and the duration of contracts and interns’ tasks and responsibilities.

But as well as that, there seems to be less concern about students on placement in the public services – both in Europe and in the UK.

And given the way in which time on placement usually goes way above the number of learning hours attached to the credit system, and the way in which being on placement otherwise prevents students from funding their studies through other employment, there probably should be – given that key public sector roles like nursing, midwifery, teaching and social work are all facing similar recruitment crises.

Last week, for example, the Nursing and Midwifery Council published a review of practice learning requirements for nursing and midwifery students that revealed varied learning experiences and supervision, and called for action to ensure high quality education.

The principle of “supernumerary status” is pretty clear – the student should not be counted as part of the workforce when they are on a learning placement in a clinical setting.

But an NHS review last year found students not being treated as supernumerary and being viewed as a shift worker instead. And the NMC’s report finds that supernumerary status is “commonly not upheld” partly because of an “inability to accommodate rising numbers of students and offer sufficient high-quality placements for practice learning”.

And because students have to clock up a certain number of hours, the incentives on both sides become heavily distorted.

There are never ending studies on this. When supernumerary status is not fully implemented, nursing and midwifery students experience increased stress and burnout – contributing to what are already higher-than-average dropout rates.

It’s a problem in teaching too. Evidence to the House of Commons Education Committee on Teacher recruitment, training and retention last year found:

…a danger of entering a cycle where mentor workload is high, which prevents schools offering high-quality placements, which then further adds to the teacher recruitment and retention crisis.

René Koglbauer of the Association for Language Learning highlighted workload as a factor driving low retention:

He told us that for some of his cohort of students going into teaching their 40 school placement hours made them rethink whether they want to be teachers and that there are lots of other opportunities with languages where you do not have that stressful environment that a school would present.

This cracking paper on financial inequity in postgraduate teacher education in England says that students often view unpaid teaching placements as exploitative. Trainees struggle with mental health due to the pressure of working unpaid full-time placements, juggling additional part-time jobs, and sacrificing weekends to manage coursework.

But as well as the “oh my god is this what it’s really like” thing, it’s what they’re contributing on placement that’s the additional killer:

This year is so taxing on you mentally and physically that when at work (which is essential because funding is so poor) you feel immense guilt and pressure that you aren’t writing lesson plans.

I found the workload almost unbearable without the weekend to complete any assignment/lesson plans. I was constantly being told to ease down on my hours of paid employment when financially this wasn’t possible.

Drawing the line between actual work that an employer benefits from, and carrying out supervised work “on the job” as part of a learning experience is fiendishly difficult.

But with pressure on public services to become more efficient, I think the danger without attention is that it’s not just the private sector that abuses the “entitled to payment if you’ve agreed to do work for an organisation within a set timeframe and you’ve completed it” principle.

It’s one thing to not pay people properly for their labour. It’s another thing for some professions to require students to undertake placements to learn the job while DfE maintains student finance arrangements that increasingly require students to be in part-time work.

But it’s a whole other thing for students to pay fees to undertake free labour – especially if it amounts to labour an organisation requires to function rather than something that represents well-mentored learning.

If the government’s tightening of unpaid internships rules is designed to halt exploitation is going to work, it would do well to remember that that sort of exploitation is happening in the public services too.

If the work a student does on placement is valuable to an employer, they should be paid for it. Whatever the qualification.