Working with children and families
Our relationship with families should acknowledge and understand their individual and family circumstances. This includes experiences of discrimination, grief, loss and violence.
Purposeful Professional partnerships
Working together and sharing knowledge, experience and expertise will build the competence of our workforce and enhance opportunities and likelihood for achieving positive outcomes for children and families.
The DCJNSW Practice Frameworkemphasises the importance of practitioners working together in solidarity to create a system that supports meaningful change for families. To do this, practitioners, communities and the sector form partnerships to improve practice and outcomes for children and their families.
Through building professional relationships that reflect trust, mutual respect and commitment, DCJ seeks opportunities to learn from, and enhance, each other's capacity. DCJ aims to foster collaboration anchored on a shared vision, and clear steps and responsibilities, to reach goals.
Genuine shared responsibility means that all professionals working with children and families acknowledge they have a role to play in supporting those children and families. There should be a willingness to proactively reach out to other local professionals to establish relationships and networks across a range of services. Having these professional relationships in place enables sharing of information, advice and opportunities to learn from different perspectives.
Establishing relationships with children and families themselves can provide insights from lived experiences to further enrich professional knowledge. This collective wisdom can bring new light, creativity or a different hypothesis on how practitioners might work with a child and their family.
Examples of methods that could be used to build these partnerships include:
- reaching out to other professionals to discuss opportunities for collaboration
- attending and participating in interagency and community training and events
- forming and joining relevant communities of practice
- reaching out to partner agencies to develop and deliver presentations on model collaborative practice.
The story ‘School is where the heart is’ shows what can be achieved for children when great people working with children come together to work towards a common goal.
The story ‘Dreaming Big’ demonstrates how interagency collaboration between a DCJ practitioner, a clinical doctor, and carers helped to support a young person and his family, and keep the family together.