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Do Boarding Staff Receive Enough Training and Support?

18/05/23
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Although boarding schools can provide students with a rich educational experience, these facilities pose an increasingly unique set of risks and challenges for their staff. This article highlights the need for boarding staff to receive appropriate training and support to manage risk, ensure compliance and keep everyone safe.


The “Human Firewall”

In a previous School Governance article, we referred to the frontline staff who manage everyday operations of an organisation as the “human firewall”, a term coined by Michael Rasmussen. The concept behind the human firewall is explained by Rasmussen:

The weakest area of any governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) strategy is humans. Humans make mistakes, they do dumb things, they can be negligent, and they can also be malicious. ….. Nurturing corporate culture and behaviour is absolutely critical. The Human Firewall is the greatest protection of the organization. At the end of the day, people make decisions, initiate transactions, and they have access to data and processes.

All staff in any school have to make decisions every day to ensure that students are kept safe. Nowhere is that more obvious than in a boarding context where supervisory staff need to manage issues day and night and act appropriately to keep students and staff safe, manage risk and ensure compliance. Boarding staff need to know what to do in any given situation and what the boarding school expects of them. They need to know what action to take and what not to do and what the boundaries of appropriate behaviour are.

 Communicating information to staff about what to do in any given situation is a challenge. Publishing a policy on an internal website or shared drive does not guarantee that anyone will read the policy. Effective communication of policies needs to include a range of delivery methods and strategies to make sure that the policy message is received ‘loud and clear’. Some of these strategies might include:

  • using multiple communications channels to reinforce key policies, and providing links to these, rather than relying on staff reading published policies
  • including policy updates and policy discussions in team meetings
  • providing opportunities for staff to clarify their understanding of high-risk policies and what is expected of them
  • using scenarios to test knowledge and understanding of particular policies
  • inviting staff feedback on policy delivery and communications and on the effectiveness of onboarding and ongoing training
  • making sure that polices clearly indicate how employees are expected to behave
  • thinking about the best time to communicate policies so that staff will be receptive to policy information, for example, after an incident or near miss, during staff onboarding or at team days and team meetings.

 

The Importance of Nurturing and Appropriate Culture

Related to ensuring that boarding staff know what to do is supporting them to do it. In the above quote, Rasmussen refers to “nurturing corporate culture and behaviour” as “absolutely critical” to the effectiveness of the human firewall. Similarly, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse commissioned a number of research reports, including the Hear no evil, see no evil report, which stressed the importance of organisational culture in keeping people safe:

The systems approach therefore draws our attention to the need for organisations to create an environment conducive to allowing staff to perform the tasks required of them, including implementing the necessary safeguards and defences against failure. In terms of child sexual abuse, this would include having the right policies, guidance and training. But the literature on systems approaches also highlights that this is not sufficient. The culture within which these factors operate has a major impact on their effectiveness in ensuring the safety of children.

Culture is partly created by explicit strategies and messages from senior managers but is also strongly influenced by the covert messages that run through the organisation and influence individual behaviour.

Policies and training are crucial in communicating and enforcing workplace behaviours, guiding conduct and therefore protecting the organisation. They are an important risk control. Just as important is the development of the right culture. This starts from the top down and involves everyone’s ‘actions matching their words’ regarding following policies and procedures and acting appropriately to ensure that reputation is not prioritised over student safety.

 

How Can Boarding Schools Support Frontline Staff?

Some suggested ways to improve support for frontline boarding staff are to:

  • provide training opportunities for boarding staff that address specific boarding risks and scenarios
  • ensure that boarding program policies are well-written, easy to understand and easy to access for staff and that the policies address the boarding operational context
  • review the effectiveness of boarding staff induction and onboarding as it may be incorrect to assume that, once inducted, boarding staff understand what they need to know to do their job effectively
  • review the culture of your boarding facility to ensure that students are heard and are empowered to raise issues and concerns and to ensure that key policies such as your child safe code of conduct are available to students, parents and carers
  • survey current boarding staff to ascertain both their knowledge of the policies and procedures that they ‘should’ know and to identify knowledge gaps
  • make it easy for boarding staff to access reporting systems for reporting incidents, injuries, near misses and hazards, (Rasmussen refers to this as “issue reporting”) and that all reports are followed up appropriately.

Any organisation must provide sufficient support to frontline staff if they are to achieve their operational and strategic objectives. It should not be assumed that frontline staff know what to do in all situations or will apply their common sense when confronted with novel problems (although this can be important). A thorough review of how boarding staff are trained and their access to and knowledge of critical boarding program policies will lead to a greater confidence that they will act appropriately as they go about their work on the boarding frontline.

 

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About the Author

Jonathan Oliver

Jonathan Oliver has been a lawyer in NSW since 1986 and worked in private practice (initially in general practice, and later as a specialist family lawyer) and then in community legal centres. More recently he spent 10 years as a business manager at an independent school in Sydney. He has been with Ideagen CompliSpace since 2016 and is the principal consultant in governance risk and compliance (GRC). He assists schools, commercial and financial services clients and the not-for-profit sector in all areas of risk and compliance, governance and policy management. He frequently presents to governing bodies and executive teams on GRC issues including facilitating workshops and strategic planning activities. He has presented at many education law webinars on risk and compliance and related topics.

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