On Tuesday 22 February, CompliSpace’s Principal Consultant, Risk and Compliance, Jonathan Oliver, presented a webinar on the topic “The Burden of Risk Management on Teachers”.

Several attendees asked questions during the webinar. We have selected three of those questions in relation to the following topics:

• risk assessment and ‘repeat’ activities/events
• risk control policy development
• sports competitions among schools that are not run by a sports association and related risks

and Jonathan has answered them below. You can also request a webinar recording by clicking here.

Question:

Do you always need to undertake a risk assessment for an activity or is it okay to simply implement the controls without undertaking a risk assessment where the risks are well known and have well established and accepted control measures? Doesn’t the Safe Work Australia Code of Practice “How to Manage Work Health Safety Risks” (Code of Practice) ** support this approach?

**https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/system/files/documents/1702/how_to_manage_whs_risks.pdf

CompliSpace Answer:

Schools should develop standardised risk controls to manage the risks associated with activities and excursions. This will ease the burden on teachers and lead to a consistent application of safety procedures across all of the activities that a school would typically undertake.

Many schools fail to fully appreciate that, for most activities and excursions, there are known risks that can have fairly standardised controls. Using transport risk as an example, standardised transport risk control policies could include the use of:

• school vehicles
• staff vehicles
• rented vehicles
• private bus companies.

Other transport risk control policies might include (for example):

• travel and public liability insurance
• servicing and safety
• use of seatbelts
• supervision of students in vehicles
• driver qualifications and training
• maintenance and safety records
• checks to be undertaken before deciding which bus company to use.

However, developing consistent and standardised risks controls for activities will usually not remove the need to undertake a risk assessment for each activity.

The Code of Practice says that a risk assessment should be carried out when (at 3.1 on page 9):

• there is uncertainty about how a hazard may result in injury or illness
• the work activity involves a number of different hazards and there is a lack of
  understanding about how the hazards may interact with each other to produce new or
  greater risks
• changes at the workplace occur that may impact on the effectiveness of control measures.

In most situations where schools are undertaking an activity or excursion, all three of the above bullet points may apply and therefore a risk assessment should be undertaken.

Firstly, on many occasions there will be uncertainty about how the hazards associated with an activity may result in injury or illness due to changes in students and staff attending and the medical conditions, activity limitations, competencies, experience and training of both staff and students. Volunteers should be included in this as well if they attend and participate or provide extra support and assistance with the running of the activity. The key question is: what is the overall risk that the proposed activities may cause injury or illness to this group of people engaging in this activity? This will require a risk assessment.

Secondly, understanding and assessing the impact of the interaction of a range of hazards associated with an activity on the overall safety of an activity is crucial. Rarely does any school activity involve one single hazard. A typical offsite activity or excursion would include hazards such as transport, food and beverage, venue safety, use of external contractors, and student and staff medical conditions and capacities. Understanding the interaction and impact of all of these hazards on the overall safety of an activity will require a risk assessment.

Thirdly, there are many possible changes at a school that will impact the effectiveness of control measures for an activity. The most obvious is changes to the staff involved in the activity and the relative experience/inexperience and training of those staff. The ‘workplace’ includes any location where an activity is taking place so “changes” includes weather conditions, new venues being used for the first time and new contractors providing services to support the activity, to name a few.

Two final comments:

• There are additional requirements for schools to manage activity and excursion risk which flow from the law regarding duty of care. Schools have a duty to take reasonable care to prevent injuries that the school should have reasonably foreseen. This is in essence a risk assessment process.
  
  
• The research into fatalities in outdoor education highlights situations where, what seemed to be a very safe activity, can turn out, in hindsight, to be unacceptably risky. The reason for the activity becoming unacceptably risky might be the differences from one occurrence to the next of the same activity because of variations in people, equipment and the environment. (See Andrew Brookes (2018) Understanding the Unthinkable - Preventing Fatal Accidents in school and Youth Group Camps and Excursions Published by Springer eBook: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89882-7)

Question:

If a school develops standardised risk control policies, isn’t there a danger that risks will be missed as teachers simply apply a formula? Don’t teachers need to ‘buy-in’ to the risk management process by identifying the risks and developing the controls to manage those risks they have identified? Surely each activity is unique and not all risk control policies that a school might develop will apply to each activity.

CompliSpace Answer:

• School should develop standardised risk controls for their activities so that there is consistency of risk controls across all the activities of the school. There is a substantial difference between a risk assessment that lists a few controls in bullet point form and a comprehensive risk control policy or set of policies for an activity that covers all the main risks associated with the activity. (See the answer above for more on this.)
  
  
• The level of complexity associated with school activities is an important consideration when thinking about developing risk control policies for activities, but it is also the reason why developing these policies is so important. In other non-school risk settings, the more dangerous and complex the risks, the more time and effort that is invested in ensuring that everyone is aware of how the risks are to managed and specific tasks are to be undertaken safely. Risk controls would also usually include providing comprehensive training to staff.
  
  
• School settings are no different in that teachers should be guided as to what is required of them in controlling the risks associated with an activity rather than being left to identify the risks and come up with the controls themselves. It is the responsibility of the school to ensure that all risks are identified and that detailed controls are in place and are effectively implemented in order to manage the risks.
  
  
• Outdoor education providers have very detailed risk control policies and regularly train their staff in these policies. School should take the same approach in relation to their activity policies. The higher the risk the more detailed the policies that should be developed and the more important it is that staff understand and are trained in these policies.
  
  
• Our experience is that, when schools start thinking about the risk controls that they have in place for their activities, they realise how little guidance they provide to their teachers. Our survey results have shown that risk assessments submitted by teachers for an activity often show that many risks and risk controls for an activity are not being identified or, if identified, have insufficient controls.

Question:

What are the implications for schools in situations where they play sports against other schools in a competition where there is no sports association to oversee the competition and the local council grounds are used? How should we approach this from a risk management perspective?

CompliSpace Answer:

In all cases a school has a non-delegable duty of care to its students. This means that the school can be liable for injuries to students that occur when they are under the control of a third party (e.g. a school outdoor education contractor) and the injury was caused by the negligence of the contractor. A really good example of this is the case of Harris v Perisher Blue (Harris v Trustees of the Roman Catholic Church for the Archdiocese of Sydney [2011] NSWDC 172).

Some aspects of this question need legal advice or input. For example, if a student is injured due to the uneven surface of the Council playing field, who will be liable? The answer is complicated. For example, if the ground is clearly unsafe and has large holes then the owner of the oval such as the Council may ultimately be liable but, due to the non-delegable duty of care principle, the school is most likely to be involved in any negligence claims and court proceedings if there was an injury. The courts may also take the view that the school failed in their duty by not inspecting the ground to identify any hazards associated with the ground’s condition.

Some general comments:

• Sport competitions that are organised by a group of schools (but who are not in an association) should develop their own agreed risk documents for the competition. A set of agreed risk controls would be appropriate. These could cover everything from first aid, to weather and thunderstorms, to the ground conditions, the use of qualified umpires and coaches, codes of conduct students and coaches and parents, rules regarding taking photographs of students by parents and also inspections of grounds and facilities prior to the game. The development of competition risk control policies might also include the development of pre-game checklists.
  
  
• Many schools that organise sport competitions together informally end up incorporating and becoming a sports association and obtaining insurance to cover the competition. They also then develop risk control policies to cover the competitions run by the association. You can understand why they do this.
  
  
• The school should undertake a risk assessment process for the activity and develop their own policies in the absence of any association policies. The risk control policies would normally include ground and facility inspections prior to play. Other things to think about include students using public toilet facilities (e.g. Council-owned) where any member of the public may also use those facilities and the overall management of interactions with members of the public in those public locations.
  
  
• Checklists are a good idea. Some schools provide a safety checklist with the paperwork that they give to the supervising teachers. The safety checklist should also cover things such as what to do in extreme weather and thunderstorms.

Upcoming Webinar 

Ask an Expert: Practical Risk Assessments in Schools

In response to the many questions raised in our recent webinar "The Burden of Risk Management on Teachers", CompliSpace is running a short (30 min) follow-up session which will deep dive into some of the critical areas of risk raised by schools and how they are applied in practice, including:

• how to develop standardised risk controls to manage the risks associated with activities and excursions
• approaching sporting competitions from a risk management perspective
• the role of checklists in reducing the burden of risk.