It has always been important to highlight confidentiality for early years practice and to understand the nature of partnership between practitioners and parents. A new version of these existing aspects to good practice has arisen because technology has broadened communication.
E-mail has been joined by online networks, some of which are set up for professional communication between people in a similar line of work. The social networking sites are designed for communication within personal life.
Some early years practitioners have learned to communicate through such sites with existing friends and acquaintances, as well as making new contacts. Other members of the workforce use e-mail and search the internet, yet are unfamiliar with online social networking (see box).
PROFESSIONAL OBLIGATIONS
Confidentiality and the nature of information online remain significant issues for professional networking sites and chatrooms. Typing into your own computer or mobile phone feels like a private conversation in your personal space. On the contrary, online communication can be very public and leaves a digital trail.
Some practitioners are very responsible about keeping their professional life separate from social conversation - online or face-to-face. However, unreflective use of social networking sites has made it necessary to revisit the boundaries between work and personal life, including the nature of partnership with parents. It is up to individuals to deal with the consequences of off-hand remarks about friends and acquaintances. It is a different situation if practitioners talk at length online about their job or the details of a 'bad day'.
Everyone has a right to a personal life separate from their hours of work, and early years practitioners are no exception. However, anyone could be called to account for behaviour in their private life that directly questions their ability to do their job well and safely.
Everyone has the responsibility to establish appropriate boundaries between the personal and work aspects of their life. Additionally, early years practitioners have joined that group of professions in which issues of confidentiality are especially important.
In their role as a key person (or a childminder), practitioners form a close relationship with individual children and their parents. They get to know a great deal about children and their family life. Parents trust them with personal information and will sometimes confide in them about significant family events or upheavals.
It would be unprofessional behaviour for practitioners to use information about named children or families as a 'good story' to be recounted to friends in face-to-face conversation. However, if done online, this kind of confidence breaking can travel considerably further and more swiftly, developing a life well beyond a practitioner's immediate circle.
There is no way that visual or sound recordings from work, let alone featuring children, should ever appear on social networking sites. Early years practitioners in a group setting should never be using their own camera, nor that function on their mobile phone, within the provision.
AFTER HOURS
Respect and consideration for fellow practitioners does not cease with the end of the working day. If practitioners have a problem with a colleague or their manager, the professional approach is to talk it through face-to-face. It is not acceptable to unload frustrations through messages on a networking site (professional or social), where they are potentially very public.
It is wise to consider - before posting a comment - whether practitioners would be prepared to say those words to the person concerned, or in a staff or network meeting. If not, then it has to be inappropriate to place them on the web.
An additional issue is that thoughtless, and possibly inaccurate, online postings of a disaffected practitioner could be taken as supporting evidence by a parent with a concern about the setting or a disagreement with an individual.
It is judged reprehensible in any line of work for employees to reveal details about the working of their organisation or confidential business matters. Again, if there are serious problems or professional concerns, then these should be brought to the attention of an appropriate person or regulatory body.
THE RELATIONSHIP WITH PARENTS
Partnership with parents has long been a vital strand of good early years practice. Practitioners should develop a positive and sustained relationship with the parents, or other primary carer, of the children, whose nurture and early learning they share with their family. However, this is a friendly, working relationship and not a friendship as such.
Negotiating this boundary has always needed some careful discussion. Decisions made about personal time should not undermine an appropriate professional partnership, nor lead to an inequality of approach between different families.
Policy has not always been consistent across provision. But generally the stance is that early years practitioners should not develop personal relationships with parents, for instance, through taking responsibility for children outside working hours or accepting invitations to family events.
In social networking terms, the equivalent policy is that practitioners do not become online friends with parents of the children in their care. Practitioners should not try to judge whether this parent will be 'safe' as an online friend, no more than believing there will be no repercussions from stretching other ground rules for individual parents.
LONG-TERM FRIENDS
Some practitioners live, and maybe also grew up, in the neighbourhood where they work. Any policy has to accept that some parents are long-term friends with individual staff in a nursery or playgroup.
Those practitioners have to take responsibility for drawing their own line. Face-to-face or online they need to say something like, 'You know I don't gossip about work' or 'You've pushed my nursery button. I'm not going to talk about ...'
ESTABLISHING A CLEAR POLICY
Policy documents need to include short sections to cover the issues raised by social networking sites and other online opportunities such as chatrooms, message boards and the short messages (tweets) exchanged on Twitter (www.twitter.co.uk).
There is no need to create a separate internet policy. It is more effective to show that these are new versions of longstanding professional issues around confidentiality and partnership with parents. It should be clear that these expectations also apply to students, those on work placements and helpers/volunteers.
Here are some suggestions from a fictional nursery:
- The FineStart nursery team takes a professional approach to confidentiality and the privacy of family life. Our policy is that staff do not make or accept invitations to become online friends with parents or other family carers on any social networking site. This policy also applies to all students and helpers.
- Facebook, Twitter, other social networking sites or personal blogs are a public form of communication. In their non-work time, staff, students or helpers remain responsible for taking care not to post anything online that breaks confidentiality about children, families or colleagues, or that could damage the reputation of FineStart.
- During the working day, personal mobile phones are kept in staff lockers. Photos are only taken on the nursery cameras (and after parents have completed the general consent form). Photos are used only within the nursery or printed to go into children's personal portfolios.
INVITATIONS
Everyone in any staff group needs to be committed to the policy and able to explain the reasons behind it. It is possible to ignore the invitation to become an online friend or deal courteously with a query in face-to-face conversation. You could say, 'We take care of your children. It's important for everyone that we draw a line between our work and personal life.' If a parent presses, you can follow up with, 'We either say "yes" to everyone or "no" to everyone. "No" is the fairest way.'
The issues raised by social networking sites have taken time to surface and some practitioners need to backtrack from being online friends. Perhaps practitioners made the decision because it seemed rude to decline a parent's offer. Whatever the situation, the explanation should avoid the approach of, 'We're not allowed to be online friends'. As with any other policy, that phrase suggests that the practitioner would agree, if their manager were not stopping them.
Once a clear-cut policy is in place, it can be explained during the familiarisation process as families join your provision. You can put something into the brochure and on to your website. In the meantime, it may be useful to alert parents to the clarification. In a newsletter, you could write something like:
- We are pleased to take care of your children and we enjoy our daily conversations with you all. But every family needs to be confident that we draw a clear line between our work and personal life. Like many other nurseries, we have talked about the implications of social networking sites like Facebook. We have decided that staff should not become online friends with any parents, so that professional boundaries are maintained.
My thanks to Jill Lakeman, director of Early Years, Southampton and to the team of Southlands Kindergarten and Creche for their professional insights into this topic. Thanks also to Drew Lindon for his knowledge of social networking sites.
A GUIDE TO SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES
Social networking sites combine the communication capabilities offered by e-mail and instant chat, with the opportunity to post your own content on the web. Various sites exist, though Facebook is very popular in the UK, so it is a good example to describe the basics of how these sites work.
To have an online presence you need to set up your personal profile on the Facebook website. You choose how much to enter on to your profile, but members often provide a lot of information about their past and current personal life. You then add regularly to your pages about what is happening in your life, your views and feelings about events. Facebook also enables users to add photos, videos or sound recordings to their profile.
Some comparable online facilities differ in their approach. MySpace enables users to post a relatively static page of information for other people to find out about you. Alternatively, a common trend is for individuals to maintain 'blogs'; essentially a list of diary entries for the person who has set up this small, individual website. Usually anyone can access a blog and add comments, but that is the limit for interaction through the site.
In contrast, sites like Facebook, Ning or Bebo are designed to be very interactive: you communicate in a variety of ways with other people, while offering content you choose to place online.
Once you have your own profile, you can search for other people by name. If they are also members of Facebook, then you may be able to see their profile, which acts like a website home page. You set the security settings for your Facebook profile which determine who can see your content, and how much they can see; many people choose to restrict access only to 'friends'. Networking develops because you send a request to someone, asking if they are willing to be listed as a friend on your profile page. Other people send you requests through the site, asking you to become a friend on their profile. You can accept with a 'yes', decline with a 'no' or ignore the request and not respond either way.
Facebook friends can view your profile and other content pages, such as photo albums. However, you also receive automatic updates from your list of friends, detailing changes they have made to their information, for instance that they are now 'single' or 'in a relationship' and comments they have posted. This information appears on a personal 'news feed', which greets you on the home page when you go into your own profile. Each profile also has a 'wall', on which you and friends can post comments.
FURTHER INFORMATION
- Howstuffworks explains the main online social networking options: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/social-networking
- Nursery World, 'Editor's view', 5 March 2009, and Karen Walker, 'Be discreet online', 21 January 2010
- Jennie Lindon (2009) Parents as partners: positive relationships in the early years, Practical Pre-School Books
