HOW WE CAN HELP
While we debate the Baby P tragedy in our staff rooms, I wonder what it is we are doing to help support the children we work with? How well do we know their parents, and how often do we stop to consider the bruises or the odd scratch, the few days off nursery or the sudden holiday to Spain? Do we offer support to parents and allow them to access the advice and services that we, as trained professionals, can offer?
We are in a unique position to offer the support and gentle advice parents may choose to take or ignore - but if we never offer it they never have the choice. How many health visitors do you know, how many GPs, teachers, midwives, therapists, child protection officers, learning support workers, social workers? We as professionals in a multi-agency discipline have access to all of these resources; parents may not. We can direct services their way, and provide a channel of communication and trust that may just educate a parent enough to save a life.
Everyone is responsible for the death of Baby P. The parents may have dealt the final blow, but professionals allowed them to. Step in! Take some control of the experience and information at your fingertips and use it to make this world a better place. No one is asking you to go and remove a child from their parents. However, the building of trust between you could lead to where they might just admit they need help.
Chelle Davison, Halifax, W Yorks
- Letter of the Week wins £30 worth of books
THE PLACE FOR TV
In response to 'No place for TV' (27 November), I agree on the importance of considering carefully the role of TV within our settings. Dr Tanya Byron's report, 'Viewtrition: Children and television today' states, 'TV provides educational and cultural experiences for children and so provides breadth and depth of information not locally available to all.'
Derek Hayes would like to ban TV from nurseries because of his experiences of seeing 'cartoons being shown to help lull children to sleep or keep them hypnotized while the staff take breaks.' While no-one condones such a misuse of television, to ban all TV from nurseries would be to throw away the baby with the bathwater.
There is a big difference between casually switching on a cartoon as an 'electronic babysitter', and showing a pre-planned, carefully crafted educational DVD. Such tried and tested resources are used in thousands of settings by informed professionals to broaden and deepen children's knowledge and understanding of, for example, different cultures and occupations. Indeed, the EYFS Practice Guidance recommends, as effective practice, to 'extend children's knowledge of cultures within and beyond the setting through books, videos and DVDs, and photographs.'
TV is often the only way that a nursery can enable children to gain an insight into experiences it would be difficult to make accessible, for example visiting the home of a Hindu family at Divali or seeing how firefighters refill their fire engine - all active viewing experiences that challenge stereotypes, provide positive role models and, as practitioners testify, inspire role play, in a context wider than that of an individual setting.
Don't ban TV from nurseries, but use it as a 'window on the world'.
Linda Mort, educational director of Child's Eye Media
REFLECTING DISABILITY
I too think it is extremely important to 'stop highlighting people with disabilities as a rare species' (Letters, 6 November).
As a nursery owner, Ofsted asked me to reflect diversity more through the resources I provided. Many of the books I found did highlight or explain the disability of their 'special' character, but I think this gives children the wrong message.
This led me to create 'Hattie and friends', a range of pre-school resources showing disability in a positive way. The stories do not mention disability in the text which means children accept each character for who they are. Their disability is purely incidental.
The 'In the Picture' project has a list of over 50 books that include characters with disabilities on their website, www.childreninthepicture.org.uk.
Lesley Berrington, author and publisher, www.hattieandfriends.co.uk - Send your letters to ... The Editor, Nursery World, 174 Hammersmith Road, London W6 7JP; letter.nw@haymarket.com; 020 8267 8401
