Dr. Breda McTaggart:

I would add to that. Students are finishing college on a Friday and they are doing night duty on Friday, Saturday, and possibly Sunday night, to try to sustain this. They are effectively working a full-time job over the weekend. We are in the north west, so obviously it is a different socioeconomic place, but everybody has experienced this. Everybody has students who fall into these categories. When I was a nursing student, I got paid. It was not very much, but I got paid to do my training, and it is a training to be professional in one's practice. I can come up with any figure, but it would need to be evidence-informed and it definitely needs to be comparable to what would be earned in a job because the addition of working the whole weekend is compromising their learning. They are tired, without a doubt, when they come in on Monday morning, so if we can mitigate against that, we will have better results and better professionally qualified social workers.