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Team cooperation in addressing ESL – lessons learnt from health and social care and education
Wednesday 11 February 2015, by ,
The many lessons from health, social and education settings for multi-professional teams dealing with ESL have been well researched (e.g. team training, sufficient time, funding and resources). Moreover, specifically for ESL teams, discussing how they approach ESL prevention, their understanding of ESL as well as creating an educational alliance are important. However, putting the recommendations into practice remains a challenge.
The aim of the article is to review the literature on multi-professional teams in health, social and education settings, including multi-professional teams dealing with ESL – what are the conditions for them to function successfully, and to identify any caveats. Based on the lessons learnt from these settings, recommendations to ensure the success (or continued success) of multi-professional teams working in ESL are provided. The most noteworthy and overriding recommendation is to ensure the provision of team training. This will help address any ethical dilemmas that might arise from different professionals working together (e.g. the student’s privacy) as well as develop respect for the potentially different professional and organisational values seen among professionals. In the long run, inter-professional education for professionals working in and around schools should become the norm. Lessons drawn from multi-professional teams in schools show the issue of sufficient funding, time and resources (to avoid work overload) is crucial as is clarifying the roles and responsibilities. Continuous attention to minimise the amount of bureaucracy related to teams’ functioning is important. Moreover, the issue of using the school as the place for delivery of the service and institutional resistance to external teams working on-site in schools should be discussed.
One study shows that most European countries have established a multi-agency partnership ESL practice made up of multi-professional teams. Based on limited studies, it is recommended that team members discuss their ways of approaching ESL prevention (e.g. like preventing absenteeism only or focusing on any education, health or social difficulties) and their understanding of ESL (e.g. does it stem from the student’s lack of investment or inadequate teaching, learning, parental involvement). Another important issue is the need to develop educational alliances on multiple levels, including teachers (to create bonds with teachers).
The recommendations concerning ESL multi-professional teams that are presented here bring together lessons from diverse settings and are also very closely aligned with scientific findings from the literature on small teams. Yet going beyond these recommendations and putting them into practice may pose a challenge.
[1] There is wealth of research and publications on the topic of multi-professional, inter-professional, cross-professional, multi-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary in relation to cooperation, collaboration, partnership, practice, work, communication coming from a range of fields, e.g. aviation (e.g. Thomas, Sherwood & Helmreich, 2003), health-care/medicine (e.g. Leathgard, 1994; Daly, 2004), social care (e.g. Frost, 2011), education (e.g. Downes, 2011; Edwards & Downes, 2013; Markle, Splett, Maras, & Weston, 2014). There are issues of defining the meaning and wide array of alternative terminology is used and debated, that can be concept-based (e.g. inter-disciplinary, multi-professional, holistic), process-based (e.g. teamwork, partnership, collaboration, cooperation, liaison, alliances) or agency-based (inter-agency, inter-sectoral). For example, there is an on-going debate on differences between cooperation and collaboration in different sectors (e.g. Kirschner, Dickinson, & Blosser, 1996; Kozar, 2010; Nissen, Evald, & Clarke, 2014). However, for the purposes of this article the terms are used interchangeably.
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