Reinvigorating Fields of Practice through Placement Innovation

The current challenges facing field education render the need for innovative perspectives to guide future practices. With placement demand increasingly exceeding supply, new approaches are required to support programs to achieve their placement targets. This chapter presents innovative ways of addressing some of these challenges which provide opportunities to foster change and development in field education. To this end, this chapter provides an overview of field education innovations as they exist across different fields of practice. Two examples of innovative responses are discussed that have developed in aged care settings and primary schools in response to the pressures of placement demand. We acknowledge that social work purports a long history of practice in both these practice settings. However these examples are innovative in that they are newly operationalised for these programs, with placement models established that potentially can be scalable to the degree of placement demand the programs face. These innovations have implications for future field education delivery.