Employability is an organising narrative within the global, neoliberal economic discourse, with relevance across different educational contexts. Most attention is paid to attaining the knowledge and skills relevant to gain employment and competitive advantage. This is particularly concerning in university programmes that develop professionals who work with children.Placements are a common approach to embedding employability within university curricula. This article explores student placements in primary school settings in the north of England. Analysis considers students' engagement with their own learning and with the children who are essential to that learning, who may be marginalised as a feature of it.Keywords: Childhood, Employability, Higher Education, Placements.Placement, the opportunity to learn alongside children and young people in their homes, schools, nurseries/kindergartens, and other settings, is a long-standing feature of university vocational education programmes. More recently the neoliberal 'employability' discourse has come to be a significant organising feature of university education (Tomlinson, 2012) and an aspect of global economic relations (Hill, 2002;Olssen and Peters, 2005). Consequently, increasing numbers of university programmes offer students a placement. Significantly, the employability discourse is focussed on the needs of the market and ignores wider political and moral concerns, including children and young people's needs, in the socially mediated relationship between politics, power and people's experience of the employability agenda (Reid, 2016).