After completing task 5a and coming to find out what the “actual” ethical policies were at the school I am working at, I thought it would have been much easier to get hold of! Obviously the main issue within a school would be ‘safeguarding’ and for this, the information provided was plentiful with lots of “what to do if such and such happens” and the correct procedures you must follow. The more I was looking at the information however, the more I felt I needed to know about what was meant by the term ‘safeguarding’. It is a word used frequently when discussing ethics in a school environment yet one I feel is used without much thought behind it. I decided to google it and got this definition from the website: http://www.safenetwork.org.uk/getting_started/Pages/Why_does_safeguarding_matter.aspx
What is safeguarding?
It might be difficult to accept, but every child can be hurt, put at risk of harm or abused, regardless of their age, gender, religion or ethnicity.
Safeguarding legislation and government guidance says that safeguarding means:
protecting children from maltreatment
preventing impairment of children’s health or development ensuring that children are growing up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care.
taking action to enable all children and young people to have the best outcome
and
“the action we take to promote the welfare of children and protect them from harm - is everyone’s responsibility. Everyone who comes into contact with children and families has a role to play.”
In addition to this, there is a government website https://www.gov.uk/childrens-services/safeguarding-children which has over 30 different links to different to multiple types of information all to do with safeguarding which just illustrates how much data is out there and how important an issue child safety is.
Anyway, back to the workplace and I still could not get hold of a code of conduct. I asked one person who said they would need to ask another.On the website however, they did have a list of ‘policies’ but these were all aimed at the parents/pupils and not for the staff. This is a form of ethical considerations which I did not think about that as I had only looked at things from my point of view (staff). This just highlights that a document which every workplace must have, in any industry, is done just to “tick a box” and the information is not to hand for every employee. Obviously, this statement is only based on one incident so after making it, I cannot speak for every workplace as that may not be the case.
No comments:
Post a Comment