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How To Deal With Accidents In School
One of the main issues that I come across when working with schools’ is the way that accidents are treated. So to truly understand how to deal with accidents in school you must understand the whole process from incident all the way through to reporting.
The usual situation is that an accident occurs within the school, it is reported and recorded on the schools’ accident report form or book. Usually, the First Aider does this. The record sheet is then filed away somewhere not to be looked at again. If a pupil is involved, other procedures may occur, such as sending a bumped head letter home, or contacting the parents.
If I am lucky, the accident form or book is shown to a senior member of staff who has some responsibility for health and safety matters. They are supposed to decide if an accident investigation is warranted but too often these are just signed off and then filed with no investigation occurring.
As an auditor, I ask to see these forms to get an impression of the types of accidents that are occurring and to see how the school are dealing with the problem.
In very few cases, do I find that an accident investigation has occurred, let alone one that would be deemed to be suitable and sufficient.
When I question the school on this, a variety of answers are given. “I didn’t know that I had too” or “The council does that” or “I just don’t have the time to investigate each one”. These are the most common responses provided.
Are you expected to investigate each accident?
In short, the answer is no. This would be time-consuming, unreasonable and virtually impossible considering the numbers of incidents that are being recorded on a daily basis.
It is expected that sufficient information is collected initially, to enable the person with health and safety responsibility in the school to make a judgement on whether an investigation is required in that instance. For example, the events described may be unusual, a serious injury may have occurred or a work activity was being undertaken by a member of staff and they had not followed the school’s policies.
Why should you undertake an investigation?
Successful Health and Safety Management relies on a cycle of continuous improvement. This will improve standards and decrease the risks across the school. SafetyMARK supports this view in all of the services that we provide to our schools.
Of course, the school would prefer that accidents didn’t happen, but when you are dealing with large numbers of people on a daily basis and a complex organisation with lots of activities going on then accidents are inevitable. This should be expected by schools.
However, we shouldn’t accept it when they do. Accidents, give a school the opportunity to question its own systems and procedures. An opportunity to see what went wrong and can we put it right. An opportunity to improve and prevent that type of accident from occurring again.
Accident Investigation – Root Cause Analysis and the 5 Whys
The simplest and easiest way to find out the cause of an accident is to use Root Cause Analysis and to use the 5 whys. By repeatedly asking the question why? You can peel away the layers of an issue, just like an onion, which can lead you to the root cause of the accident. The reason for the problem could lead to another question.
Example 1: A member of staff fell off of a chair and injured their back whilst putting up an art display.
Why were they using a chair? A stepladder wasn’t available.
Why? Stepladders are only used by the caretaker and these were locked away at the time.
Why? To keep them away from staff and pupils because nobody else has had working at height training and the risk assessment states this as a control method.
Why? School policy is that only the caretaker is to undertake working at height activities.
Why did the staff member put up the art display? It is an expected part of their role, they have done it before and the caretaker is always too busy.
So despite the school having a no working at height policy for school staff, it is still expected that staff have to put up art displays. So the cause of the accident is the fact that staff feel they have to use a chair just to get the work done because the caretaker is unavailable to do the work.
By changing the working at height policy, undertaking a risk assessment, providing a set of steps and training the staff member the accident could potentially have been avoided. Alternatively, the school should adhere to its own policy and ensure that the caretaker has the time to do it.
Example 2: A child slips over in the playground and injures themselves.
Why? They were running in the playground during lunchtime.
Why were they running? They were playing a game and slipped down the concrete steps.
Why were they running down the steps? They were not being supervised and were running in an area where they shouldn’t.
Why wasn’t a supervisor present? We normally have five supervisors present but one was off sick and hadn’t been covered.
Why wasn’t the supervisor covered? Nobody else was available to provide the cover.
In this case, the child slipped in an area of the playground where they shouldn’t have been running due to a shortage of supervision. This could have happened even if all supervisors had been present but because the school had decided that five were necessary they should have arranged for cover to comply with their policy.
When undertaking an accident investigation be careful not to reach conclusions too early. In both examples, the wrong conclusion could have been reached. The staff member was at fault for using the chair, the child fell over because it was a playground incident.
Be open-minded, examine the facts and consider all possibilities. Using the “5 whys” should help to keep you on track. See it as an opportunity to improve.
SafteyMARK at your school
If you need further advice or guidance on how to deal with accidents in the education sector and how the SafteyMark Award Scheme can benefit your school, don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of our friendly team over at InHouse Safety.
If you would like to learn more about the SafteyMARK Award Scheme you can head over to our Is It For My School page.
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