Teaching safely in order to teach safety

Having robust health and safety procedures within the school environment is a no-brainer. We all want our children to come home every afternoon, having survived the day unharmed.

Teaching our children to keep themselves safe is second nature for parents, so why bother teaching it in schools? This is a question that arises again and again, as many people believe a child’s survival skills are inherently natural and learnt through experience. But is that enough?
    
Here are a few facts that might help to answer that question. Firstly, accidents, most of which are preventable, are the main cause of death and disability for children in the UK. More than 80 per cent of preventable deaths up to the age of 19 are caused by accidents. Around 10,000 children are permanently disabled each year by accidental injuries.
    
Furthermore, children from poorer families are five times more likely to die as a result of accidents than those from wealthier backgrounds. Falls, often due to distraction, are the leading cause of accidental injury among children and young people, while the main causes of death or injury in children are burns and scalds, poisoning, drowning, choking and suffocation.

Teaching safely teaching safety
Risk is part of life but accidents do not need to be, and, contrary to popular discourse, life changing accidents can be prevented. But to achieve this we must educate children, and their parents, to protect themselves as well as implement other measures to help them stay safe while they learn and grow.
    
While it is correct that parents and experience will be the main sources of safety education, it is important that teachers and schools also play a part. A recent survey in Scotland, conducted by RoSPA and the Children’s Parliament with more than 200 nine to 11 year olds, found that 92 per cent of those asked felt teachers should play a role in their safety education.
    
That’s why here at RoSPA, we advocate ‘teaching safely, teaching safety’. While the teaching safely aspect has been ingrained both morally and legally, for decades now, teaching safety is still only delivered intermittently, through a mish‑mash of programmes and projects.
    
The other problem with teaching safety is that a fine balance needs to be struck – while we want our children to become risk aware, we do not want them to become risk averse. We still need children to go out there and enjoy life, but to do so in a way that they manage risks and do not fall foul of an avoidable accident.

Safety guidance
This is why provision of safety education as part of personal, social and health education (PSHE) is important. The PSHE Association has recently produced a suggested curriculum for the Department for Education, which states that at Key Stages One and Two children should learn ways of keeping physically and emotionally safe, and how to respond in an emergency, and at Key Stages Three and Four they should be taught how to assess and manage risks to health, and how to keep themselves and others safe.

In 2001 the Department for Education and Skills released some useful guidance on teaching safety in schools. Their guidance recommended taking a positive approach, so that rather than focussing on what not to do, the teacher encourages pupils to recognise what they already do in life to keep themselves safe, and to extend this to less familiar places and situations.
    
It advocates ‘starting where the pupils are’, with teachers exploring with the pupils the extent to which they understand concepts such as risk. A careful assessment of what language is being used to describe such concepts should also be undertaken – ‘risky’ does not have the same meaning as ‘dangerous’, yet research shows primary school children equate the two, while teenagers associate risk with anti-authoritarian behaviour.
    
Finally, the guidance states that an active approach should be taken, with group work, role play and problem solving to help engage with pupils’ everyday behaviour. Centres such as Safeside, based at the West Midlands Fire Service headquarters in Birmingham, where pupils can explore staged street scenes, homes and shops to look for hazards, can make for useful and informative field trips. Similar schemes exist across much of the UK.

Safety education
Teaching safety activities can be built into lesson and activity plans. For example by getting children to work in teams to identify the risks and controls involved in science activities, getting them to evaluate what might go wrong and what needs to be done to prevent situations prior to school trips, and by getting students to evaluate what went well, what went wrong and why as part of debrief/wash-up sessions following activities.
    
RoSPA has backed calls by the Education Select Committee to make PSHE, including safety education, statutory in schools. Our National Safety Education Committee is fully supportive of a recent report from the Education Select Committee which recommends reinstating funding for the continuous professional development for PSHE teachers and school nurses, as well as calls for Ofsted to resume its regular subject surveys of PSHE provision.
    
Statutory provision of PSHE will help to reduce the toll of harm by giving children and young people the knowledge to recognise and cope with everyday hazards. But outside of statutory PSHE there are other things that schools can do to help nurture the risk aware citizens of tomorrow.
    
Many schools are also adopting elements of the ‘forest school’ approaches. These teaching methods give children an excellent opportunity for active and involved activities in a more natural environment. Studies have shown that these have a great learning benefit and a very low injury rate. This debunks any preconceptions that may exist that children are safer when restricted to classrooms and concrete playgrounds.
    
Young, inexperienced drivers have the highest accident rates on the road - they account for 25 per cent of road deaths, and one in five will crash within their first year of driving. Young drivers, especially men, tend to be overconfident and are more likely to drive in risky ways, such as driving too close to the vehicle in front, incorrect use of speed, and dangerous overtaking. They often have excellent vehicle control skills, but lack of experience means that they are poor at identifying hazards and assessing risk.
    
RoSPA recommends that schools offer pre-driver and driver education programmes to their year 12 and 13 students to prepare them for life on the road. This in-school training should focus on key issues such as speed, seatbelts, drink and drug impairment, and peer pressure.
    
One good example of resources that could be used is the Cow project, produced by Gwent Police, which featured a hard‑hitting video of a young girl, nicknamed Cow, and the consequences of texting while driving, along with a teacher pack. However, such videos should not be used in isolation unless they are shown in context, and pupils are provided with a coping strategy.

Maintaining safety
So that’s teaching safety. But, as mentioned, teaching safely is now ingrained in what we do every day, which means we must not become complacent and let our standards slip.
Accidents still happen in schools, and unfortunately tragedies do occasionally occur. Recently, 12-year-old Keane Wallis-Bennett was killed on 1 April last year when a wall in the changing rooms at Liberton High School, Edinburgh, fell on her. Other serious accidents have since occurred at this and other schools.
    
Due to the huge variety of learning activities and the number of children in schools, maintaining safety is a constant challenge. Well-managed schools are really safe environments, but children can still be injured rushing between classrooms, at break time, in the playground, or while taking part in physical activities to keep fit.

We must do everything we can to ensure children are not injured, but at the same time, as with teaching safety, a fine balance must be struck. Children still need an element of risk in their lives, to gain essential risk‑awareness skills that will see them prosper in later life.

Bath and North East Somerset Council produced some useful guidance on risk benefit in play, outlining the way in which risks should and can be minimised without losing their major benefits.

Balanced assessment of school safety management programmes, such as RoSPA’s SchoolSafe review programme, help schools indentify and manage what is important for teaching children safely and how to teach them safety.

A fundamental building block of both these elements is our old friend, the risk assessment. What are suitable, beneficial and appropriate activities for a rural primary school will, of course, be different to those of an inner city secondary school.
    
A simple example from Bath and North East Somerset Council is a play space with nothing but grass, which is very low risk but also very low benefit in terms of stretching children and learning about risks. By adding something to climb or swing on, you are increasing the general risk of injury, but also significantly increasing the benefit. Applying such a method to children’s learning and day-to-day school life is important. While it might be a natural reaction to wince at the idea of putting children at risk of harm, we cannot deny them the life benefits that risk will give them.

Further information
www.rospa.com/school-college-safety