Practice Education

Are you an experienced practitioner who is interested in supporting and developing learning in your professional workplace? The Post Graduate Certificate in Practice Education provides multi-professional education for health and social care practitioners undertaking a practice educator role. The programme is delivered flexibly, with significant opportunities for application, on-the-job learning, and research. This course is appropriate for anyone with the responsibility for supporting student learning and workforce development/education within community healthcare, NHS, local authorities, private, social care or voluntary services.

Our exciting programme of study is taught via online learning and is applicable to professionals working across a range of health care and social work settings. It is divided into two equally-weighted modules, which are mapped to the Social Work Practice Educator Professional Standards (PEPS) stages 1 and 2.

The first module, Supporting Learners in Practice Education, will cover the application of creative supervisory methods that address complexity of learning, including different models of supervision. You will explore how to manage complex and contentious issues such as managing failing students, unconscious bias, diversity, appeals and assessment bias. This module will include assessing performance in practice, assessment standardisation and observation of supervisory and assessment skills.

The second module, Leading Learning in Practice Education, will encourage you to develop your own practice by demonstrating application of practice, new roles and contemporary practices such as long arm supervision. There will be a focus on leadership in practice education, facilitating a culture of supervision and learning support and interprofessional working. In the final component you will address supervision in practice through the implementation of a quality improvement project around supervision and practice education.

You can take the modules over 1 year, starting in either January or September, or over 2 years. The course has been structured to be accessible to working professionals with different schedules and demands on time. The assessment has been designed to be appropriate for application in practice and will consist of a portfolio and the implementation and evaluation of a quality improvement project.