How to run a two-week practicum for caseworkers

Put the caseworker on the agent's real output for their caseload for ten working days: drafted letters, held award payments, escalations and refusals. A senior caseworker decides each item independently and nothing goes to a resident or a bank account without them. The bar is at least 95 decisions in every 100 right and no missed safeguarding concern.

What is the practicum, and who owns it?

In casework, an agent drafts letters, summarises case histories, books appointments and prepares payments. The caseworker decides what is sent, what is paid and what needs a closer look. The practicum checks that a caseworker can do that well on live cases before they do it alone.

The team manager owns the practicum. A senior caseworker with a current certificate supervises. The safeguarding lead defines what counts as a missed concern and is available for any case that raises one. The caseworker owns their decisions and writes a one-line reason for each.

Residents are real people, often in difficulty. That shapes everything below: every outward action during the practicum is countersigned.

How do you build the queue?

Aim for around 15 decisions a day, roughly 150 over the fortnight, across:

• letters drafted by the agent: appointment letters, requests for evidence, outcome letters;
• case summaries the caseworker must check against the file before relying on them;
• award or grant payments, held at depth 4 for a person;
• vulnerability or safeguarding escalations raised by the agent;
• requests the agent refused, such as a relative asking for case details without recorded consent;
• appointment changes outside the service's own rules.

Seed anonymised past cases for any type the live queue does not produce, especially escalations. Two weeks without a single safeguarding case leaves the most important skill untested.

The steps

1. Person (team manager): brief the caseworker on the bar, red lines and log.
2. Agent, depth 1: route items for the caseworker's cases to the practicum queue, tagged by type.
3. Agent, depth 2: present each item with its draft, the deciding bound and the facts behind it, showing which came from the case system and which the resident declared.
4. Person (caseworker): decide to send, edit, hold, return or escalate, with a reason.
5. Person (senior caseworker): decide independently, then compare.
6. Person (senior caseworker): countersign every letter sent and every payment released.
7. Agent, depth 1: log both decisions, the match and any red-line flag.
8. Person (senior caseworker, then assessor): review the log after day ten.

How do you set and apply the bar?

A decision is correct if it matches the senior caseworker's or the senior agrees it was sound on the evidence. A letter edited for tone but otherwise right is correct. A letter sent with a wrong date or a wrong outcome is not.

The red lines for casework: missing or delaying a safeguarding concern; sending an outcome the evidence does not support; disclosing personal information to someone not authorised to receive it; releasing a payment without the evidence the policy requires. One miss fails the practicum.

Public bodies carry duties of fairness and transparency, so the reason behind each decision matters as much as the decision. A right outcome with no recorded reason counts against the caseworker.

Which controls matter, and what evidence do they leave?

• Countersignature on letters and payments. Evidence: both names in the append-only record.
• Independent senior decision. Evidence: the senior's decision logged before comparison.
• Safeguarding lead on call. Evidence: notes of any consultation.
• Daily debrief. Evidence: a line per mismatch.
• Full log. Evidence: the practicum log template for caseworkers.

What should you measure?

Correct decisions out of the total, by item type. Red-line misses (zero). Summaries the caseworker caught as wrong or incomplete, which shows they are reading the file and not just the summary. And time to act on escalations.

Where does it usually go wrong?

The caseworker trusts the summary. It reads well, so it goes unchecked. Build at least five summaries with a planted gap into the queue.

The senior is too busy to debrief. Mismatches then repeat. Protect ten minutes at the end of each day.

The practicum overlaps a statutory deadline or a seasonal peak, and seniors start countersigning without reading. Move the dates.

Approval rights follow the calendar, not the log. Whether caseworkers need a certificate to approve held actions is the organisation's decision; see do caseworkers need a certificate to approve AI agent actions. On where responsibility sits, see are caseworkers accountable for an AI agent's mistakes. The structure carries over to technical teams too; compare running a practicum for IT administrators.

Where the Academy fits

Pryme Intelligence Academy's Certified Pryme Operator includes a practicum built the same way: two weeks of real review decisions, at least 95 in every 100 correct, no missed red line, signed off by a Pryme assessor. Before it, the Operator modules on human review and when something goes wrong prepare caseworkers for exactly these items, with tests set in their own industry and role. More in the guide to AI literacy and certification for people who work with agents.