VET and work placement governance
The placement is the student's to run.
Students find their own employer, complete their own safety training and watch their own paperwork move — which is the part of a placement that teaches them something. The coordinator keeps every placement in view without having to assemble the picture by hand.
Emailed DOCX arrangement forms, chasing employer signatures, and coordinator spreadsheets.
Why this exists
The gap between digitising a document and running a round.
A signed form is not a ready placement.
Turning the arrangement form into something digital is the right first move, and any school still emailing a DOCX around should make it. But the form is one artefact produced at the end of a process that runs for weeks and involves four people, only one of whom works at the school. Finish the document and you have finished the last five minutes.
The work that fills a term sits earlier than the form: which employer said yes, whether the parent replied, whether the safety training is done, whether anyone has visited. Spread across a spreadsheet, an inbox and a memory, that picture takes an afternoon to assemble and is out of date by the time it is finished. The problem is where the information lives, not the person keeping track of it.
Work Placement manages the round rather than the document. Volume is why it matters now: VCE Vocational Major requires at least 80 hours of structured workplace learning for Unit 1 and again for Unit 2, so a cohort that once did a single week in Year 10 is placed through the year.
- The whole round, not just the arrangement form — search, consent, readiness, visits and sign-off.
- Arrangement forms populate from data the school already holds, rather than being rekeyed.
- Employers sign from an email link. An account is there for the ones who want it, not required of the ones who do not.
- Every signature captured before the placement starts, which is the rule.
- Students submit the employer they found themselves, which is how most placements really begin.
- Parents are asked once, clearly, and chased only if they have not replied.
Work Placement by Sprout
End-to-end governance for VET, SWL and work experience placements.
What it does.
Employers sign from an email link
Placement agreements and evaluations are signed through a secure one-click link, with no account required. Employers who host students regularly can create one and keep all their placements in a single view.
Government forms, auto-filled
Official state arrangement forms and PDF certificates populate straight from placement data, instead of being rekeyed.
Live student and visit tracking
Students submit employers and upload resumes; teachers log workplace visit observations from a phone, at the workplace.
Central coordinator view
Filtering, bulk approval queues, visit delegation and employer management in one place, rather than four.
Knowing where every placement stood used to mean an afternoon across a spreadsheet and an inbox. Now it is one screen, and it is current.
The coordinator board
One screen, and what each placement is waiting on.
Every placement, and exactly what is blocking it.
The board does not rank or score anyone. It shows what the school already knows about each placement alongside what is still outstanding, so the placements that need attention this week are visible without anyone assembling the picture by hand.
| Student | Employer | Dates | Waiting on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 10 · A. Nguyen | Riverbend Veterinary | 14–18 Jul | Ready |
| Year 10 · J. Patel | Sunbury Auto Electrics | 14–18 Jul | Parent consent outstanding |
| Year 11 · M. O'Brien | Macedon Ranges Council | 21–25 Jul | Insurance expired |
| Year 10 · S. Ali | Bakers Lane Childcare | 21–25 Jul | Ready |
| Year 11 · T. Wu | Not yet found | — | No placement |
One workflow, four people
The same placement, seen from each side.
A placement needs four people. Each one gets their own way in.
Most placement software is built for the coordinator and leaves everyone else to cope with whatever it produces. The student, the parent and the employer each have a part to play, so each gets a path suited to what they actually have: a phone, a few minutes, and no system to learn.
The student owns the next step.
- Sees the placements open to them, filtered to what their year level and course actually allow.
- Records the employer they have found themselves, which is how most placements really begin.
- Uploads the signed forms from their phone, at the kitchen table, without a printer.
- Gets told what is still outstanding, in one sentence, until nothing is.
What it discharges
Sourced from the Department's own policy, not from us.
The obligations, and where each one lands.
These are requirements on Victorian schools under the Department's structured workplace learning and work experience policies, not features we invented. Each row is something a coordinator is already accountable for.
- The arrangement form is signed by the employer, the student, the parent or carer where the student is under 18, and the principal or nominated person — all of it before the placement commences.
- Every signature is collected in sequence against the placement, and the board shows which one is outstanding. A placement cannot read as ready while a signature is missing.
- A copy of the signed form goes to each party; the principal or nominated person keeps the original.
- Distribution happens on signature rather than as a separate job someone has to remember.
- The student has satisfactorily completed OHS training — safe@work, A Job Well Done, or the WHS unit of competency in their VET program.
- Recorded against the student and checked as part of readiness, so it is not discovered at the last minute.
- A Travel and Accommodation form where the student travels with the employer or stays away from home.
- Raised automatically when a placement is flagged as away-from-home, rather than depending on someone noticing.
- Child Safe Standards apply in every school environment, and a workplace on placement is one of them.
- Supervisor details, visit records and incident reporting are held against the placement, so the trail exists before anyone asks for it.
- The student can reach the coordinator to report a problem.
- Coordinator contact travels with the placement, on the student's own device, for the days they are there.
Obligations summarised from the Department of Education's Policy and Advisory Library (Structured Workplace Learning and Work Experience, Ministerial Orders 1412 and 1413). Confirm the current wording against the PAL — it is the authority, not this page.
Before you ask
Including the one where the answer might be no.
The questions that come up first.
How does this compare with the Department's Work-Based Learning App?
They solve different amounts of the problem. The WBL App produces the arrangement form digitally and does that job properly. Work Placement runs the round the form comes out of — the employer search, parent consent, OHS readiness, the workplace visits, and the board that tells you which placements will not be ready. If the form is the only part that takes your time, you may not need us. If you are placing a VM cohort across the whole year, the round is where the work is, and the round is what this is built for.
Does this replace our SIS?
No. It reads the student record your school already keeps and writes placement outcomes back to it, so whatever you run stays where it is and nobody maintains a second list of students.
Our employers are small businesses. Will they actually use it?
Nothing is required of them. A link arrives by email, they read what they are agreeing to, and they sign — no account, no password, nothing to install, which is the only version that works for a business hosting one student for one week. Employers who take students often can create an account and see all of their placements together, but that is their choice rather than a condition of helping.
What happens to our data if we stop?
You export it and we delete ours. Placement records are school records; they are not ours to hold onto, and nothing about the trial or the product is designed to make leaving hard.
Who actually built this?
It was built inside an operating Victorian secondary college, for its own coordinator, because the paper process was not surviving the volume. It has run against real placement rounds before it was offered to anyone else.
Open for trial
A real placement round, not a sandbox.
Work Placement is open for trial now.
We are taking a small number of Victorian secondary colleges onto Work Placement. It is a paid pilot rather than a free trial: $500 covers the school for twelve months, well under the retail rate, and it buys our time as much as the software. You run it on real placements, with your own students and your own employers, and we set it up with you rather than handing over a login and wishing you luck.
- What you run it on
- Real placements, with your own students and employers — not a sandbox with sample data.
- What we do
- We configure it with your coordinator, import your existing placements, and stay on hand across the twelve months.
- What it costs
- $500 per school for twelve months — substantially below the retail rate. Pricing after that is quoted per school, against your enrolment.
- What happens after
- You keep your data either way. If it is not working for you, you walk away and nothing is stranded.
Shared platform
The part that makes the suite worth more than the app.
One student record, shared across the suite.
Work Placement runs on the same student record, the same sign-in and the same permission model as every other Sprout app. Staff do not maintain a second list of people, and a change made once is a change everywhere.
- Student information systems
- Learning management systems
- Single sign-on providers
Talk to us
The useful first conversation is about what you already run.
Ask about the trial.
Work Placement is open for trial now. Tell us when your next placement round is and we will come back to you about fitting it in.