Category Archives: Interagency Working

Bread and Butter Policy

I came across this article in the news and I couldn’t help but post about it. Essentially, this English school attempted to bring in a policy whereby children who did not bring in their lunch money would not be given lunch that day and would be given bread and butter instead. While I admit this is better than simply not feeding them, it is still a horrific policy.

The problem I have is that it singles these children out. It may be that they had the money and simply forgot it, and that one day of not having a proper lunch would not do a huge amount of harm, though I can imagine it would be very embarrassing. The worry I have is for those children whose families struggle to pay for these meals.

At £2.10 per child per day, I can see that it adds up – £10.50 a week, and that’s just for one child! For these children, not being included with their peers could become a regular occurrence and other than being a humiliating experience, it could be worse for their health. Surely it is better for a child to have a substantial meal in the day than this proposed alternative, a meal with the proper nutrition and enough to fuel them for the rest of the day. I also think that it should be pointed out that for some children their school meal is the main or only source of healthy food and understanding of good choices, to remove this could be disastrous!

Luckily, I am not the only one who sees this in the same was as I do, after complaints from parents, the school had about-turned and agreed not to introduce this policy! However, I still find it worrying that they ever thought it was sensible, fair and inclusive in the first place. Essentially it would be punishing children for something usually out with their control!

If you would like to read it, then please see below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-35381990

The Meeting

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On Friday, my group and I were asked to role play a meeting, each of us received a piece of paper with our character and some extra information on it. We were role playing a meeting about a child called Jack who has various issues and we had to try to find a solution to. The characters were:

Jack’s Mum
Jack’s Dad
The Head Teacher
The Class Teacher
The Health Visitor
Jack’s Mum’s Social Worker

It was really interesting to watch the scene play out. I was Jack’s Dad and I knew that Jack was not receiving enough care from the mother, that the mother had lost her job and that this was for stealing.

Among all the other discussions I found myself focussing in my head that the mother was clearly not capable of looking after Jack and, as one of Jack’s issues was stealing at school, I thought this behaviour had been learned from the mother. In the end it turned out that the mother had not been stealing but had lost her job due to too many absences because she was not coping. This really got me thinking, and what I realised is that nobody in that group had all of the information. Because of this, there was not an easy way of making the necessary decisions.

If this was a real-life meeting, I would imagine that the mother would feel ganged-up on by the father and all of the various professionals. Our group decided that Jack should go to stay with his dad to allow his mum to get back on her feet, but I know that in reality this would not have been so easy a decision and the mother would not have let this happen so easily.

What I have learned from this activity is that there are always two sides to every story and we need to be able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. Another observation I made was that Jack was not included in any decisions we made, and it seemed that none of the adults had even asked him his opinion. This shows that there is a real need for childrens’ voices to be heard by those who hold the power to make huge changes in childrens’ lives. I will keep this in mind when it comes to my own practice, and in the classroom while teaching.

Interagency Working, This is Just the Beginning…

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Since today was our third day back after the Christmas holidays, I thought it could do with a post about the beginning of the new module. The module is about Interagency or Multiagency working. This, as you can imagine, is highly important for teachers. In the most basic terms, it means professionals in the lives of the children: teachers, police, social work, healthcare workers, community learning officers… The list goes on but those are some of the main ones.

We have been split into groups of 7 or 8. We are to do group activities and go on community visits together. Having met and discussed this with the rest of my group, I am feeling really confident in our ability to work collaboratively with this group. This is a massive benefit, as we have been told that this is not always the case. Clearly, as professionals, we have to simply work with the other professionals in the childrens’ lives – obviously, we cannot allow children to be put in danger just because we do not particularly like their social worker. I believe that the same logic applies here, as we cannot just decide not to work with each other because we do not like each other. I think that it is essential to remember this throughout the module with the group and to reflect on any issues arising.

I think that the main goal for the module is to keep up with the lectures and tutor directed tasks. Of course it is always good to keep up with these things, but for this module there are 6 other people who will be relying on my to do my share of the work in order to be able to do do their own or to learn their own materials. I also would like to set the goal of building a relationship with the remainder if the group, as I have identified the need to be able to speak to each other openly and honestly, especially if any problems arise between us. Towards the end of the module, I will update this post to see if I have managed this.

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