ABSTRACT
Safeguarding episodes provide early years practitioners with perhaps the most personally challenging and distressing incidents of their careers. These episodes require precise, clear, factual information to be passed between a variety of people, including children and, where necessary, those working outside your own team. However, the very personal nature of this communication process can have a profound and often negative impact on the situation, and the relationships between the people immersed within it. In the rst instance, staff working with children must have a thorough appreciation and understanding of their own abilities to communicate with the people around them. This chapter will explore issues of personal communication during safeguarding episodes and introduce the reader to key concepts through the voices and experiences of early years practitioners and a police trainer. The early years practitioners interviewed for this chapter include settings managers, senior practitioners and room leaders, each with over ten years’ experience. They are based in a variety of settings in the north of England. The police trainer has over 30 years’ experience as both a front-line ofcer and a trainer of interpersonal communication with new police recruits. While members of the public may well construct their own understanding of safeguarding and perpetrators, perhaps fed by tabloid sensationalism, practitioners must be conscious of far less conspicuous clues in their daily working role, as Practitioner A revealed:
They were talking about birthdays or something and this child just said out of the blue, ‘My birthday cards were up on the shelf and Daddy went mad, and knocked everything off the shelf and started saying things.’ It just shows how quickly something can come out at the most random moment; it isn’t necessarily when you’re changing their nappy.
