Partnership Working

When working with children or young people we need to cooperate. People working together include: • Parents • Carers • Colleagues If we work well as a team in our setting, everything will run smoothly from making sure the children feel safe and enjoy their time at nursery and constantly learn. We will also work more effectively, and it will benefit children if everyone does this. Encouraging ourselves to help children develop themselves. At my setting where I work, we always try to work as a team, and it is a big help for each other knowing everyone at the nursery is willing to help one another. All colleagues need help, whether they ask for it or not. I think wherever there is work, people need to think about other people’s needs. This is the best way to understand all staff’s needs, and how to get all colleagues working together to the best of their abilities.Relevant partners in a nursery setting would be Parents, Social Services, Carers, Speech Therapists, SENCO (Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator), Nursery, Colleagues, Psychologist, Police and many more. Conversations and records are recorded and securely stored in documentation, also in diaries (records kept of child’s day to day activities) and is kept in a locked cupboard in the office with limited access. However, all parents have the right to see their child’s records upon request.Referrals may occur if a child has a medical condition (such as a hearing or vision defect), going through a bereavement (losing a loved one), suffering from dyslexia. There are many ways practitioners and parents can work together. The EYFS focuses on four elements, including: • Supporting learning and development • Sharing information• Contributing• Making decisions and promoting different approaches and courses of actionBut it is so important for children day nurseries to partner up with parents because the most important element of any children’s day nursery is trust. Leaving your child is a difficult thing to do, especially at such a young age, and it’s up to the day nursery to show that your child is in a trusting environment. Parents need to get involved at every stage of a child’s development, and a partnership is an ideal way for parents to understand how their child is getting on outside of their care. Another example is Shared Expectation. At children’s day nurseries, the expectation is that parents will actively get involved in their child’s learning. For the parent, they expect their child to be left in the right hands, and that those hands are actively progressing their child’s learning and development. And Keeping Up to Date. Children learn at different rates. A partnership with parents ensures that each parent is kept up to date on their child’s learning and development. Within my work setting, partnership with parents is developed and sustained through effective communication. We follow the key worker system and therefore the key worker builds a professional relationship with the parents of their key child. When the children first start at the nursery, they have a settling in period where the parents will tell us more about the children’s routines and requirements. We have settling in sheets to be filled in which are updated with the children as they progress through the nursery via room transfer sheets which the parents must sign to show their agreement that all the information is still relevant and correct. We have contact books to read from at handover when the child is collected at the end of the day, and they inform the parents of many things from how the child’s eat and slept throughout the day, to what the child has enjoyed playing with and even which friends they’ve played with. There is also an area within the book for any additional messages that the parents may need to know about.