Early childhood education services play a vital role in children’s safety and wellbeing. Safeguarding in this setting goes far beyond policies on paper. It is the daily commitment to create environments where every child feels seen, heard and protected.
For this blog, we spoke with our Jessica McQuoid, Safeguarding Consultant, who has worked extensively with early childhood services across New Zealand. We asked her to share some of the key insights she has gained from supporting teams to strengthen their safeguarding practice – what helps, what gets in the way, and what truly makes a difference for children.
Can you briefly explain what “safeguarding” means in the context of early childhood education?
Safeguarding refers to all the steps taken by an ECE service to proactively support children’s wellbeing and the prevention of harm.
For ECE services to be considered child-safe, they must have all these safeguarding systems in place:
- Safety checking of all workers (including volunteers).
- Workable and robust child protection policies and procedures that clearly detail how the service will respond to
- 1) child abuse and neglect concerns and
- 2) staff allegations of poor conduct, abuse and/or neglect.
- Trained workers who are competent at recognising and responding to signs of abuse and neglect in children.
- Codes of Conduct that clearly explain expected worker behaviour.
- Workers who value and listen to children’s voices, especially when they share experiences of harm or that they feel unsafe at home or while at the ECE service.
Policies and procedures alone are not enough to keep children safe and well in ECE settings; services must ensure they have all these pieces of the puzzle in place if they are to create a robust safeguarding culture where the needs and best interests of children are paramount.
In your experience, what helps ECE workers feel confident in raising concerns or following child protection procedures?
Before an ECE worker can raise a concern, they need to feel confident in recognising child abuse and neglect. Having trained kaiako in multiple ECE settings, I have found there are often conflicting ideas about what child abuse and neglect looks like in the context of ECE. This is due to kaiako having different levels of education and professional experience, as well as differing personal beliefs about what constitutes ‘good’ parenting and child wellbeing that they subconsciously draw on when deciding whether a concern is a concern, particularly when it comes to neglect and emotional abuse.
There is also a tendency for kaiako to talk themselves out of their concerns or wait until things get more serious if they aren’t 100% sure in the first instance that what they are seeing is abuse or neglect. This is where team training in safeguarding and child protection training becomes paramount to ensure that every worker has an in-depth understanding of the signs and indicators of child abuse and neglect in young children and are made aware of the impact of personal bias in their work and how it can increase risk and vulnerability for children.
ECE workers must also have a clear understanding of how their service will respond to concerns raised, and what their own role is in this response. Child protection policies and procedures are key here. These documents must be simple for kaiako to follow and must accurately reflect how ECE teams operate in the child protection space, including detailed information around who is responsible for what. It’s also important for ECE workers to know that if they raise a concern, this does not necessarily mean instant statutory involvement for the child and their family.
This can help to alleviate workers’ fear around getting things wrong or making things worse for a child and their family. ECE teams need to feel confident about what early intervention looks like in child protection and in the context of their service. There are many early intervention actions that services themselves can take, such as having robust conversations with family and sharing with/requesting information from other agencies, that will help them to provide more effective wrap-around support for families without needing to involve statutory agencies. These actions must be detailed in policy and procedures, alongside the option to report to Oranga Tamariki and Police.
What are the biggest challenges and barriers you see among ECE teams when it comes to child protection?
The biggest challenge for those in ECE, particularly kaiako, is having conversations with parents and caregivers about child protection concerns. This is an important part of early intervention work however I often see and hear from kaiako that they shy away from these types of conversations or rely on management to take the reins as they don’t know what to say or they worry about how parents/caregivers might react.
Because management typically lead the response to child protection concerns, there is often the assumption that they will be the ones to step in and have these often-challenging conversations with families. However, kaiako usually have the strongest relationships with children and their families, so are therefore best placed to raise concerns directly with them. There is a real need to support kaiako to have confident, non-judgmental child protection conversations with families so that they can work together to address concerns, as early as possible. This way, children and families get the help they need when it’s most effective.
Another significant barrier to child protection in the ECE sector is a general a lack of curiosity amongst kaiako as to what might be going on ‘behind the scenes’ for families when there are concerns for their children. It’s important that those in ECE continue to ask the question “why?” when they witness concerning signs and indicators in children and endeavour to understand the bigger picture without judgment.
This is where being able to have productive conversations with families becomes crucial, particularly when there are concerns about neglect. We know that most neglect is unintentional. In other words, families will often be facing adversities that negatively impact on their ability to care for their children. If ECE teams don’t work to find out what these adversities are, then it will always be challenging to address these types of concerns.
How often should safeguarding training be refreshed, and what makes it truly effective rather than “tick-box”?
Ideally, training should be refreshed annually.
While online learning is available on demand for kaiako, there is nothing quite like face-to-face training. There are more opportunities for organic discussion and collaboration when teams are physically in the same space together. When these discussions are guided by a knowledgeable facilitator, kaiako are more engaged and willing to reflect on their practice, ask questions, and have their thinking challenged.
This being said, ECE services don’t need to wait for formal training opportunities provided by external providers before they have team discussions about child protection. It’s important for management to keep child protection top of mind for their teams by discussing it regularly in staff meetings; whether this looks like talking about child protection policies and procedures, working through a few child protection scenarios together or chatting through challenges they may be facing in this work.
How can leaders create a culture where safeguarding and child protection is everyone’s responsibility, not just management’s?
✓ By supporting kaiako to have conversations with families when they have concerns for their children.
✓ By having open conversations with their teams about active child concerns and keeping them in the loop about what is being done in response to these concerns.
✓ By valuing their team’s input when responding to concerns and being willing to be challenged in their response. Teams should feel safe to speak up if they ever disagree with a decision made at management level or feel like more should be done in response to child concerns.
✓ By regularly talking about their service’s child protection policy and procedures as a team.
✓ By providing ongoing safeguarding and child protection training opportunities for staff and volunteers.
✓ By implementing a child safeguarding Code of Conduct.
✓ By encouraging team members to hold each other to account by speaking up when they have concerns about fellow colleagues’ conduct. This reporting pathway must be clearly outlined in procedure.
How can Te Tiriti o Waitangi principles guide and strengthen child protection practice in ECE?
The principles of partnership and participation are everything to child protection work in ECE. A major strength in the ECE sector is the opportunity to develop strong and trusting partnerships between services and families. These partnerships, when built on openness, transparency and trust, allow ECE workers to affect the most change for children as they provide a solid foundation in which to speak with families about child protection concerns and provide support.
It is crucial that families are given every opportunity to participate in decisions made about their child(ren)’s wellbeing. ECE workers must create safe spaces for families to share their thoughts, feelings and ideas. Families are the experts of their own lives and so we as professionals must endeavour to adopt a ‘teach me’ attitude and allow families to educate us on their circumstances and what support they feel will be most beneficial. This is particularly important when working within a culturally diverse population.
The Tiriti principle of protection is particularly important when working with Māori whānau. Traditionally, child protection systems and practices have been ethnocentric, imposing Western ways of being and doing on Māori whānau for some time. There is a need to protect and platform Māori cultural values and practices in this work.
ECE workers, particularly those who are Tangata Tiriti, can play their part by having cultural humility and ensuring that discussions about support for whānau do not centre on referrals being made to non-Māori services or Western practices being imposed on them; rather, ECE workers should allow themselves to be led by whānau. Services can also take it upon themselves to find out what Kaupapa Māori services are available in their community for whānau and must engage in professional development as necessary to build their bicultural competence.
Supporting early childhood services to keep children safe
At Safeguarding Children, we are committed to helping early childhood services build confident, capable safeguarding cultures.
We are proud to be listed on the Ministry of Education SELO Provider Panel for Programme 1 and 2. This means the Ministry has approved us to deliver SELO-funded professional development for early childhood services. It reflects our trusted, evidence-based approach and our ongoing commitment to children’s safety and wellbeing.
Our team works alongside services to strengthen policies, build confidence and embed practical safeguarding practices that last.
If you would like to talk about how we can support your team, get in touch – we would love to hear from you.
Together we can make a difference.