Background: Clinical practice influences students’ development of clinical competence and professional identity. Quality clinical education is critical to the success of pre-registration midwifery student learning. Measuring the quality of clinical learning environments and the impact of the professionals who work within them on student learning has been neglected.

Aim: To optimise midwifery clinical education through the development, testing, and evaluation of new tools that measure the different perceptions of clinical learning experiences, with an emphasis on measurement of impact and the role of preceptors.

Methods: This thesis uses a sequential multi-method approach and is comprised of published and unpublished works encompassing five sequential studies, each with their own question, design, and specific outputs. The studies are interconnected but also stand alone on their own merits. Final inferences are drawn from all five studies.