Duty of care needs to be around yourself before you can look after anyone else.
Schools are left responsible for too much. We are not responsible for bad parenting. The parent that allows the 11 year old to have a facebook account, by suggesting/allowing they change their year of birth instantly is impacting that child’s sense of identity. The date of their birth. They need to own that. One little white lie tells that kid it is ok to lie if it is an online lie, creating a division between cyber and real world, when really there isn't one. You are ‘you’ online and in real life. When you start allowing, or even encouraging your tamariki to mess with that, you are in effect colluding to create that division.
There should be no need for cyber safety. It is safety. There should be no need for a ‘digital citizen’, you are just you. Trying to make the internet into an abstract world is confusing and unnecessary, it is a part of the world.
Questioning kids - never ask questions that give the information - i.e. ‘was it alcohol?” - “what was it?” is better.
Always report concerns to the ‘leads’ - kg and wk
Rule of optimism - don’t go with ‘but they are a nice person’ date and record every concern you ever have. A nice person can still be a predator/offender. What if you are right on your first instinct? Better to be wrong and err on the side of caution. Allowing the rule of optimism allows more harm to be done.
Don't make assumptions about what has happened to the child, just record.
Act without delay, to report. Encourage staff to trust gut feelings.
Make sure you know NAG 5 - safe physical and emotional environment for staff and students
What is our child protection policy? Find out and know it. Don’t leave it to be someone else's problem.
Four behaviours that are not a part of a teachers role:
- Creating social network connections that are not driven by school and educational needs with students - keep your boundaries up. Imbalance of power. Which does not cease until they mature
- Teachers who like to give gifts to students that are unknown by management. Even a pair of shoes. Everything must go through ‘the school’.
- Teachers who instill themselves into the whole family and become the go to person for the whole family. Ego based and unsafe. Use the systems in place with the school. Don't take things on board without being a part of your own systems. EVERYTHING goes through the leads of the school. Bigger systems cannot be followed if you take these things out of the system by siloing yourself. You don't have the skillset and you will be drawn into the drama of the situation and will fail to meet the needs of the student
- Teachers that hug students - confuses the boundaries for every other teacher with those students and it is not collegial. Its meeting the needs in us, not the needs of the students. Gotta be sensible about it, sometimes you cannot avoid a situation!
Don't let your kids use the school laptop. Don't let anyone at home use your laptop
Password protect your laptop when it is unattended even momentarily.
Purge your phone of images of students every two weeks, don't leave them on your personal device. Get them onto the school network where they belong. If you lose your device and it is found and/or hacked, it could give the community an unbalanced view of your professionalism which is not what you want.
