Thousands of New Zealanders training to become nurses, teachers, midwives and social workers say the compulsory unpaid placements they must finish to qualify are pushing them into debt, and many warn they are only just keeping their heads above water as fuel and living costs climb.
To register in these professions, students have to complete hundreds of hours of supervised practical work, often in full time blocks of around 40 hours a week and frequently a long drive from home. The placements are unpaid, which means students have to give up much of the part time work they rely on at the same time as their travel and childcare bills go up. The result, advocates say, is a training pathway that quietly shuts out anyone without family money to fall back on.
One of those students is Chelsea, who is studying towards a Bachelor of Social Work at the University of Auckland and faces 120 days of unpaid placement over the next year and a half. She told RNZ the schedule left almost no room for paid work. “I used to be able to work, but on placement it’s hard to work on a nine to five, five days a week situation,” she said. To cover the gap she has been leaning on buy now, pay later schemes, telling the broadcaster, “I’ve been Afterpaying gas every week, my Afterpay is at $1000 right now, from afterpaying stuff I shouldn’t have to.”
Chelsea also pointed to the gulf in pay across the Tasman, recalling that her mother had done similar support work in New Zealand for close to the minimum wage. “She moved to Australia and she’s on $40 an hour, off the bat,” she said.
The squeeze is not limited to health and social work. Anna, who is studying part time towards a teaching diploma at Massey University, said an eight week classroom placement sent her household costs sharply higher. “My childcare costs went up, I’ve got two children and they both need to be in before and after school care during those placements,” she said. The travel was manageable for her, “about 20 minutes a day”, but she noted students could be told to drive up to an hour each way.
The student allowance, currently around $372 a week, does not stretch to cover petrol, parking, uniforms and childcare on top of rent. Petrol prices have been a particular pressure point this year, with pump prices climbing on the back of overseas events and rural students burning through far more fuel than their city classmates.
University of Auckland social work professor Liz Beddoe said the strain was taking a visible toll on the people the country is counting on to staff its hospitals, classrooms and community services. “A lot of students are working on weekends, they’re working shifts sometimes in residential care settings and they’re in danger of getting exhausted, ill and burnt out,” she said. When her team spoke to students, she added, the same theme came up again and again. “What [the students] all talked about to us about was the cost of placement and the challenge of trying to survive.”
Research from the University of Canterbury has put numbers on the long term cost. It found that because unpaid placements keep trainees out of the paid workforce and add to their debt, it can take more than eight years from the start of study for a nurse, and up to 12 years for a social worker, before they are earning more than someone who simply went on the minimum wage over the same period. The New Zealand Nurses Organisation’s most recent student survey found money was a significant worry for more than 80 percent of those who responded, while around 60 percent said they had cut their paid work hours right back to get through placement.
A campaign called Paid Placements Aotearoa is calling on the government to pay a universal stipend to students while they complete the placements their qualifications require. Campaign lead Bex Howells said the current set up singles out a group of mostly women dominated professions for unpaid labour that other trainees would never accept. “If you train as a police officer, an apprentice or in the military, you’d be paid to train without question,” she said. “But if you want to be a nurse, teacher, social worker or a mental health professional, you have to pay to train.” She described the experience as “psychologically demoralising to be working for nothing”, and warned that dropout rates of up to 50 percent in some courses were the predictable result.
The campaign argues that paying trainees would do more than ease hardship. It would widen the pool of people who can afford to enter frontline work at a time when hospitals, schools and social services are all short staffed, and it would help keep newly qualified workers in New Zealand rather than heading to better paid jobs in Australia. A public petition backing the idea has been gathering signatures.
The government has made some moves aimed at workforce pressures, though not the stipend the campaigners want. Health Minister Simeon Brown has pointed to a 30 percent lift this year in mileage rates for home and community support workers and for patients travelling to specialist care, and to a bonding scheme that pays new nurses $8500 a year to work in hard to staff areas for at least three years. He welcomed the recent nursing pay settlement, saying nurses, healthcare assistants and midwives sit “at the centre of our healthcare system”. So far, however, there is no commitment to pay students for the placements they must finish before they can register.
For students like Chelsea and Anna, the maths is simple enough. They want to do the work the country needs done, but the unpaid road to qualifying is getting harder to afford every year.
Have you done an unpaid placement to qualify in your profession? Should trainee nurses, teachers and social workers be paid while they train? Share your experience in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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