As a practitioner, we are obliged to adapt to different sittings for children and young people. Every setting will offer certain benefits and sometimes drawbacks. When working with children and young people, we need to respect the duties and responsibilities of our own work role, The effective practice as a team member will depend on communicating with co workers and heads.
One must respect confidentiality of every child and the parents too. You must always put the parents first as the primary care giver of the child. Information concerning a child/children should never be shared or given out to anyone who may ask. Data protection must
be respected. Physical punishment must never be implemented upon a child. They are many ways to show that the child’s needs to be corrected. You could use the “Time Out” system. This is a discipline technique that involves placing children in a boring place for several minutes. There the child will realise that he/she has misbehaved. Time out really means time out from any attention.
There could sometimes be cases where the child/children come from different countries hence their different beliefs. We must respect all different beliefs and be careful when working with the kids during activities. One example could be, don’t mention “pigs” if doing a farm animal activity when a Muslin child is present in class. It could cause problems and upset the specific child/children. This is why, as a practitioner, we must so our homework and make sure cases like this will not arise. This is respecting their customs. All children should be treated equally and never have “favourites”.
When staff meetings take place we must always respect anyone’s contribution and also to other people (outsiders) like social workers, speech therapists, physiologists etc. These people may be very important in the help of any child/children that might have a disability or certain needs. Whenever a child may act in a different way and maybe trying to attract attention, this should not be discarded. It may be that a certain child is abused at home and is reaching out for help. The best thing one should do is to speak to your superior and then to Setha, the abuse centre in Malta, to seek advise as how to go about handling the given situation.
All the above mentioned are vital elements to relay duties and responsibilities of our own work role. Once these vital elements are put into practice, we should create a happy, safe environment for the children concerned.