Safeguarding is an umbrella term that involves everything we do in the setting to ensure children are kept safe and healthy. It means a whole range of policies and procedures. Child protection is one aspect of this and is how our setting ensures children are protected from abuse. The 2008 Statutory Guidance for the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is underpinned by the positive outcomes of Every Child Matters and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (UN,1989) which places a duty of care on Early Years Practitioners and Managers to Safeguard children and young people and promote their welfare.
This is evident in raising a CAF on a child due to observations in setting then working as part of a mulit agency team that acknowledges if children and families' health and wellbeing are affected they may not have the emotional and physical health to learn. Safeguarding children is a social priority and underpins every aspect of our setting's policy, planning and curriculum.In the last year our setting has developed practices to include ways of prompting the importance of safeguarding through including policy discussion as an agenda item at meetings, devised a policy questionnaire in the setting induction procedure so we can assess the practitioners awareness and understanding of our procedures, at planning meetings including discussion prompts for awareness of the signs and symptoms and now use long and medium term plans to look at ways to encourage an awareness of keeping safe from harm. This related directly to the statutory framework for the EYFS (DCSF 2008) and to the ECM (DFES, 2003) framework.
We are working to develop communication with parents to include ways of promoting children's welfare and keeping them safe and healthy. The Data Protection Act, 1998, sets out lawful boundaries for sharing information, so practitioners must record parental consent before sharing information in a CAF, or any other document with other professionals. The exception of this is if a child may be put at risk of significant harm, where a professional made a referral through the Safeguarding children procedures set out by the Local Safeguarding Children Board (LSCB) and in our settings policy.When working on the CAF we would explain to the child and family how we would initially share their information, with reasons explaining how we hope this would benefit them and how the document we had written would be shared with other professionals, within confidential boundaries. The Government Strategy to improve outcomes for children (DFES,2006) suggests a key element is sharing information early to aid intervention to help those who can benefit from additional services, closing the gap from the inequalities faced by disadvantaged children. Ideally children can begin to experience participation at a very early age.
It can begin within their own families, if they are adequately listened to and their opinions are valued. Through increasingly meaningful and active participation in decision-making children can develop their own identity, a sense of belonging and usefulness. This encourages them to respond to educational opportunities and enter more fully into life at school. A child, whose active engagement with the world has been encouraged from the outset, will be an adolescent with the con? dence and capacity to contribute to democratic dialogue and practices at all levels, whether at a local or an international level.
