T5 Working In Partnership Essay

The Children and Young Peoples Board in Birmingham comprises of different partner agencies and organisations that each have a duty to cooperate under the Children’s Act 2004 in strategic planning, service developments and consideration of emerging issues around children and young people. Partner agencies include:

If your setting work well as a team, you will enjoy your work more and work more effectively – and the children will benefit. Then it can have a positive impact on children’s and young peoples:

1.Understand the principles of inter-professional working within health and social care or children and young people’s setting.

We also use communication books to for each child, this makes it easy for parents/ carers to communicate messages to a child’s key worker and to inform them of their child’s daily activities at nursery. This helps to build a good positive relationship with parents/carers and also offers us the opportunity to include parents in the further development of their child at home too. (Parents and practitioners can have a lot to learn from each other).

It has been debated that children and families have received poor service because of the failure of professionals in understanding each other’s roles or working together in a multi-disciplinary

When considering a child’s needs and routines in your setting, it is important that we communicate with the parents and find out a little about the home setting so we can carry it on when they come into our care, the more we talk to the parents the more we can help the child’s emotional needs and routines.

Partnership is driven by a desire for collaborative advantage and can offer many positive outcomes, like benefits for staff and services such as less replication between different service providers. It helps them see others point of view and it keeps them from being selfish, it helps young people interact with others to achieve a goal, and it helps them develop socially. It’s important to work in partnership with others so that all agencies can share information and concerns about children and young people in their care, it also helps to keep the children safe and away from harm.

It is really important for the child/young person and their family to ensure all needs of the individual are met. If we didn’t work with other agencies our children/young people and their families would possibly miss out on valuable support and help.

During the placement I was able to spend time observing interactions between parents, children and staff. I witnessed many positive aspects in the schools approach to engaging parents and was particularly impressed by their open door policy for parents and the support provided to families in times of need by the learning mentors. As part of the admission process to the school, staff visit the parents and child at home and discuss the implementation of the home-school agreement (appendix 1.b). This agreement sets out the expectations of each of the parent, school and child in regard to their actions and attitude towards their time in school. This is often one of the first interactions teacher and parents have and Grayson (2011) suggests most teachers report these home visits to have a lasting positive effect on the child and parent-teacher relationship. During the school’s inspection in 2014 Ofsted identified relationships across the school and with parents as a key strength.

Partnership involves responsibility on both sides. Increasingly, the early care and education of babies, toddlers and young children is shared among parents, families and practitioners. A partnership approach between these people is very important, especially at times of change in children’s lives. These times might include settling in to a new setting, getting to know a new practitioner, or getting used to a new baby at home.

In order to work in partnership with parents, practitioners should work very closely with the parents and carers of each individual child to make sure that there is continuity in provision in the setting and at home by inviting information about children’s interests, sharing information about learning activities, discussing children’s development and accessing children’s progress. Parents and carers are the most continuous adults in a child’s life and that makes the transition process easier for the child as long as they are kept informed about the transition process as the child progresses from the home setting through Foundation Phase settings and then into Key Stage

Since the introduction of the multi-disciplinary approach there have been many successful outcomes for children within mainstream schools. When all services are working together the benefits and potential for the child in your school will increase. Professionals will liaise and work together with children and their families where necessary. Each member on the team must be aware of each other’s work and will share information, opinions and skills. Benefits of a multidisciplinary team: • Reduces any duplication of work, More effective and accurate collection of information • Communication is increased • Parents and students feel more respected and heard • More efficient identification of needs • Potential of tapping into more resources through

Parents should be included in delivering the curriculum. Practitioners need to find out about parent’s skills and utilise these where possible (Macleod- Brudenell & Kay 2008 p.296)

A parent who understands what their child is working on at preschool has a better sense of their child’s competency and which areas they need to work on to improve confidence and ability. Often building a positive relationship between families and teachers is easier said than done. The foundation for any positive relationship it good communication skills. Good communication is a two part effort from both educators as well as families. I believe educators should set the tone for the relationship by starting with a positive attitude and making families feel included in classroom curriculum and learning objectives. If I were an early child educator I would foster a positive family-teacher relationship by inviting families to observe the learning environment where their child will develop many their cognitive, physical, emotional, and social skills. This will allow families to feel more comfortable and at ease with trusting that their child will be well taken care of, which in turn families will be more likely to be involved. I would also ask families if the would be interested in participating in classroom activities. Activities would include having a family member come in and share a special talent, helping with active projects, or even reading a book to the class. In addition to having family member engage in

The topic I have chosen to focus my research on is family involvement within early childhood environments, and how this can foster the development of children. I have many reasoning’s behind my choice. Firstly this is an area of weakness for me, although I am comfortable with the everyday talk with families I find it difficult to include them in their own children’s learning. Secondly as an early childhood educator I think it is important to be able to build positive relationships with families that will help get them involved within their child’s environment as there should be connections between all worlds of the child. And lastly I believe that by choosing this weakness and completing this action research I will be able to improve my teaching practices within this particular area.