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