Managing and Updating Your School Risk Assessments

As the pandemic continues, schools are playing their part in managing the spread of infections by having risk assessments in place that look at cleaning and hygiene, managing social distancing, school transport, incidents and emergencies and staffing issues, with the aim of reducing the risk of transmission of the virus whilst still providing education to pupils. Done correctly, the risk assessments will help you identify any significant issues that face your staff, students and visitors and help your organisation focus on important controls.

However, it is not just the effect of coronavirus on schools that needs risk assessing: health and safety, in general, must be assessed to ensure that the school premises provides a healthy and safe place for all who use them, including staff, students and visitors.

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As a school business professional (SBP), you will have a good understanding of the basic statutory requirements of a risk assessment and the options on style and content for completing one. You should also understand the concept of ‘competence’ and ‘suitable and sufficient’, in other words, those things that mean the risk assessment exercise has been effective.

As the document holder, your knowledge will be up-to-date, but what about that of the rest of the school staff?

You don’t necessarily have to show risk assessments to staff members but you must, by law, provide them with comprehensible and relevant information on:

the risks to their health and safety identified by the assessment, and
the preventive and protective measures in place.
This information could be provided in other ways, for example as standard operating procedures or through training or toolbox talks. However, assuming you want the risk assessment to act as a one-stop document to meet all your needs, the following points make them usable.

Use appropriate language: avoid jargon unless the end-user is familiar with it.
Provide users with some documented training so they can navigate and understand a risk assessment, in a form that takes account of any language difficulties or disabilities. This is an important element in demonstrating compliance should something go wrong.
Don’t issue it until it is ready: a risk assessment can often identify issues that need to be resolved, so these should be accepted and closed-out and the risk assessment revised before being issued to employees. You can write a risk assessment as an instructional document, assuming all the controls will be in place, but you need to manage that effectively. Ideally, by the time an employee sees an assessment, there should never be anything that states ‘further controls required’ (the caveat being if that employee is given the task of making the changes).
There are two ways of making risk assessments accessible to staff: either paper versions printed and put into a file or electronic ones stored on a server. Best practice would be to hold copies electronically and to manage updates using a document control process and electronic signatures, with an email sent out for notification purposes. Ideally, you will ask recipients to document that they have seen and understand the amendments statement.

Sending revisions out with a summary of significant amendments will increase the chances of the recipients taking on the revisions, but that can be onerous. Posting notifications on notice boards or listing them in H&S committee minutes are also ways of showing due diligence. In some cases, more robust measures such as summarising changes on inset training days or at staff meetings might be required to ensure understanding has been reached. Ultimately, compliance is determined through talking to people, inspections and audit.

The guidance states that you must review the controls you have put in place to make sure they are working, and I advise reviewing new risk assessments within the first six months to check new controls have been implemented and are effective. After that, the following issues should trigger a review:

• staff reporting problems, any accidents or near misses or a major change in statutory guidance, indicating the controls may no longer be effective
• changes in the workplace such as staff changes (competence or vulnerabilities or capacity), a new process, or changes to the substances or equipment used.

One of the most practical ways of managing reviews is to have a review section at the end of the assessment that documents ‘date of last review’ and ‘significant changes to assessment’. You can add several rows in that section so that the assessment can be updated several times. If nothing has changed, it is easy enough to document ‘general review – no changes to assessment’. If something has changed, then a simple note such as ‘revisions made on the type of PPE required’ will suffice.

In the absence of a specific trigger, a back-stop date is often useful and this period is determined by the level of residual risk. High risks obviously have to be dealt with as soon as they arise, but ‘medium risks’ should be reviewed annually and ‘low’ risks every two to three years depending on experience (start at two years and if nothing has changed after a couple of reviews, you can push the next one back to three).

Risk assessments can be seen as a barrier to just getting on with school activities but if carried out properly, communicated appropriately, and viewed positively by everyone, they show that your school is carrying out its duty of care.

Andy Large, Consultant at SafetyMARK Health, Safety and Risk Consultants

You can check out the original article over at Voice Magazine.