It is vital in meeting the child's needs that parents and professionals work well together. Several factors can make this hard to achieve.
For example:
- when large numbers of professionals are involved
- when services are not well-co-ordinated.
As well as professionals and parents working together, as professionals, it's important that you work with each other, sharing information and perhaps appointing a key worker who liaises with parents and co-ordinates services.
As individual professionals, you can do a great deal to help parent-professional relationships. Reading information from other professionals may mean that the same questions are not asked for the fourteenth time. Keeping an open mind about the conclusions other professionals have reached is also important - children who are multi-sensory-impaired often respond in ways that are hard to interpret.
Children who are visited at home
Good practice includes:
- Remembering that parents know more about their children than anyone else
- Establishing the family's priorities
- Listening properly and communicating effectively (avoiding jargon)
- Providing accurate, unbiased information so that parents can make decisions
- Remembering they are a guest in the family home
- Remembering that families have the rest of their lives to lead, and not making too many demands
- Jointly identified strategies that are easily incorporated into existing routines (for example, slowing down personal care routines, leaving gaps for the child to respond) are likely to work well.
Children attending school
Both parents and professionals need to recognise that home and school are different, and work in different ways to meet children's needs. Children may sometimes respond differently to activities in the two settings.
Both parents and professionals need information from the other about your child's state - whether they've slept well or what they've eaten.
Further information
Further guidance on early intervention planning and practice is provided in Together from the Start (opens a new window), a document issued jointly by the Department for Education and Skills and the Department of Health, which is available online.
Its companion document, Developing Early Intervention/Support Services for Deaf Children and their Families (opens a new window), focuses on educational intervention for children with hearing impairments, and is also available online.
