Enforcing School Safety In The UK.

A Headteacher's Safety Management Toolkit Article The Health Rosetta Stone and Safety Executive(HSE) as the body responsible for enforcing safety laws in our schools believes that up to 80% of accidents and incidents can be attributed to what they are calling now “Human Factors”. An indication of how Human Factors integrate with the HSE’s Regulatory function can be seen in the where they emphasise such as contributory factors. The list below shows where HSE have identified Human Factors as problems in priority areas for their action.This list is extracted from the HSC’s Strategic Plan to 2010 and beyond andappears on HSE's Human Factors website. Prevention of musculoskeletal disorders and manual handling injuries Management of work-related stress Preventing falls from height Preventing slips and trips Preventing workplace transport accidents Human factors in design (e.g. alarm handling in control rooms, vehicle cab design etc) The design and effectiveness of procedures Human reliability – human error and systems failures e.g. maintenance error Assessing organisational change and its implications Effects of organisational culture Communications and their effects on health and safety Staffing levels and workload Fatigue from working patterns - shiftwork and overtime Training and competence You may wonder why I've started off with Human Factors but just look at this list again. HSE never rush into enforcement and making prosecutions without informing and reinforming the public. Now add up all the functions Rosetta Stone V3 where management can make improvements on what HSE say is 80% of accidents and where their priority areas are. Got it? What this tells us is where HSE will be focusing over the next period of time - managing safety. This is confirmed by work which I have done on Head teacher's Safety Management Toolkit user’s behalf by revisiting HSE’s Database of Enforcement and this and a subsequent article gives information and analyses the information. You can see information on this Toolkit and get access to the Analysis at swaneducation.worksites This article looks at the raw data and makes some comments and observations on Enforcing School Safety.To be able to do this I have gone through HSE databases for the last 5 years and extracted all the Education related Enforcement actions. These include : Enforcement Orders These are orders issued by Inspectors to: Prohibit an unsafe action or activity either immediately or within a specified time frame,(Prohibition Notice) Or, Improve an unsafe activity or condition again within a time frame.(Improvement Notice) These orders are the major part of HSE’s enforcement activity;for example there were 214 Orders made against schools and employers over the time period of the Database,(approx. 5 years) whilst there were only 34 prosecutions. Enforcement Notices are Orders and need to be taken very seriously by anyone who gets one as HSE will prosecute if a Notice is ignored. Ignoring an Enforcement Notice is actually given as a criterion for prosecution in their Enforcement Policy document. Let us just look at what the situation actually is in schools as regards numbers of prosecutions and notices. Prosecutions In 2004/5 there Rosetta Stone Italian were 712 prosecutions in total made by HSE in which they secured about 95% success of conviction. The total number of prosecutions over the time frame for the HSE Database is just over 4000, which shows that schools and education with 34 prosecutions account for less than 1% of all prosecutions. However, some extremely high profile cases from the education sector do not appear on HSE’s database. This is always the case for any work related death which would be prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution(England and Wales) or the Procurator Fiscal(Scotland). Thus, a teacher prosecuted for a death occurring on a school trip falls outside HSE’s database. However,they have reported two prosecutions where children have been injured on trips and HSE has followed the incident up with a prosecution. One of these was a prosecution of both the Employer(Council) and the Head teacher. Looking at the actual figures of breaches involved in prosecutions gives us some indication of where actions are occurring now and later we shall look at the breaches involved in enforcement orders which may give us a clue to future actions.