Work Experience Placements

Providing fulfilling and informative work experience opportunities

We provide work experience placements for students who are in full-time education in years 10 to 13. Placements are provided in all appropriate clinical and non-clinical areas to provide a broad range of work based placement opportunities.

We’re committed to supporting fulfilling, informative and structured work experience opportunities of up to 3 days per each academic year, for young people within the Trust's catchment area of County Durham. We recognise that work experience placements offer a chance for students to gain valuable insight and knowledge that can inform the decisions they make about their future studies and career choices.

Who can access our work experience programme?

Our work experience placements are open to:

• Students who are in aged 15 (at time of proposed placement) to 18
• Students who are in full-time education or training
• Where applicable, students with Special Educational Needs (SEN) from year 10 up to 21 years old, can apply for a work experience placement 

Our work experience placements are not open to University students or students over the age of 18 years old, including those who are looking for work place experience prior to a change of career.

How to request a work experience placement

To apply for a work experience placement, you will need to provide us with some information about yourself and also tell us about the career you are interested in, why it appeals to you and what you expect to get out of a work placement at CDDFT. 

Please note: 

• We can only accept requests for work experience that are submitted through our online application form.
• We cannot accept any forms submitted through Unifrog or similar platforms.
• We cannot accept Sharedoc or Google Doc files.

If your request is successful, we will send out additional forms for you to complete and return. These will be sent out by email as Microsoft Word document attachments. We can only take returned forms submitted as email attachments as Microsoft Word documents or PDFs.

Work experience requests are managed through the Learning and Development administration team who receive a high volume of enquiries and requests. If we have not contacted you within 3 weeks, this means your request has been unsuccessful.   

The Learning and Development administration team try to arrange placements for as many students as possible, but cannot guarantee that they will be able to arrange a placement for every student who submits an application.

Individual teams and departments across CDDFT have their own in-house rules around age limits, health and safety and what is appropriate for students to observe. The administration team are required to follow these local rules when making requests for placements.

The areas and departments unable to offer work experience placements

Understandably, we are unable to offer work experience placements in some areas. This is either due to the sensitive nature of the work carried out, or due to the potential psychological or physical risk to students. The areas listed below are restricted and are unable to facilitate work experience placements:

Other useful information

• We can only consider requests for work experience placements that have been submitted with all of the relevant information. 
• Please apply between 10 to 16 weeks before the proposed start date of the placement - unfortunately we cannot accept applications at more than 16 weeks as supervising staff may move to other wards or departments before the placement starts. 
• It takes about 10 weeks to process each work experience application - we are therefore unable to accept applications that are submitted less than 10 weeks before the proposed start date of the placement.
• Please also note that placement applications cannot be made by contacting individual members of CDDFT staff, individual wards or departments or by submitting requests by letter, over the phone, in person or by sending in your CV.