Locally, together and close to the child - how the citizenship of school employees leads to the implementation of global standards of child protection

For social pedagogy, it is important to answer the question whether the school and its surroundings are today a place where adults, aware of social and legal responsibility, adequately respond to suspicions of domestic violence against schoolchildren, and whether there is a dissemination of child protection standards, which are emphasized in international documents. Using the case study method, in Warsaw's Praga district (which was the Polish "cradle" of interdisciplinary work in the 1990s) I conducted two research (using an interview technique) on the role of schools in preventing child abuse. 10 respondents took part in the first phase of the study in 2009, while in the second phase (in the years 2019–2020) – 15 respondents. The aim of the study (in both phases) was to identify experiences regarding the quality of cooperation among school employees as members of interdisciplinary teams, in two periods of teams’ activity: before the introduction of the amendment to the Act on Counteracting Domestic Violence in 2010, and after its introduction – from 2011 (the aim of the article is to compare these experiences from both periods). The results of the research show that cooperation within the interdisciplinary teams established by the amendment is generally perceived positively by the members of these teams, although those who cooperated before the amendment, i.e., not obligatorily, define today's cooperation as too formalized and bureaucratic. The respondents' statements prove that currently interdisciplinary teams (from the perspective of a school employee in the Praga-Południe district) are less effective, and participation in their work, although obligatory, is relatively less frequent than when the meetings were voluntary.