Together Safely ‐ Developing a Whole School Approach to Health and Safety

Citation

Griffin, M. (1998), "Together Safely ‐ Developing a Whole School Approach to Health and Safety", Health Education, Vol. 98 No. 2, pp. 76-76. https://doi.org/10.1108/he.1998.98.2.76.1

This resource book provides some 300 pages of material which can be used to help schools “take on a broader view of health and safety and develop a whole school approach to the subject”. Within the 300 pages, a range of topics is addressed. It begins, naturally enough, with “Making a start”, a section which gives advice on how to navigate the materials and offers the choice of working through the entire pack from beginning to end or using the “quick starter” to try to identify and prioritise areas of concern. Taking into account the massive pressures on time in schools for developmental activities of all kinds, this second option is realistically the one that most schools would be likely to choose. Users are provided with a form of training needs analysis which focuses on perceptions about some very broad questions related to the “whole school approach”. Individual questionnaires completed by people representing different parts of the school community, collated by the co‐ordinator of the project, lead to relevant sections in the pack. One question leads the user to two sections for further action, and another to eight (out of a total of ten). More usually, it is suggested that four or five sections would be helpful.

Discounting the introduction, further reading and two appendices, there are ten broad sections to the pack. In addition to “Making a start”, these provide a very simple interpretation of some aspects of the law, and then activity‐based sections dealing with “Ethos”, “Whole school policy”, “Managing risk”, “The school environment and activities”, “Travel and out of school arrangements”, “The curriculum”, “Developing action plans”, and “Developing good practice”.

The pattern taken by each section is similar. There are some introductory comments, a selection of training and development activities, and then advice about “moving forward”, i.e. lists of “supporting resources” and reference to the action planning section. Supporting resources are catalogued at the end of the book and recommend 76 other documents as ones of which to be aware and to use as reference material.

The training activities provide the real focus of each section. These are designed to be facilitated by either a member of the school staff or, in the case of a number of specified activities, an expert brought in specially for the purpose. In the main, the aims of the activities involve “sharing of views and values”, “establishing what kind of school you are”, “perceptions and concerns” and “identification of ways to develop and support whole school approaches”.

The material is meant to be very broad ‐ in many cases it is open ended ‐ and the author emphasises the breadth of outcome at the very beginning by giving 25 indicative sample outcomes ranging from fewer accidents to informed value judgements.

The book is not a reference book about health and safety management, nor does it go into any real detail about curriculum health and safety and so some users might find it necessary to refer to other documents and/or sources of advice. Schools choosing to use this book need to have someone who is able to work as a trainer/facilitator with teaching and non‐teaching staff, parents, governors, etc. and be prepared to allocate the necessary amount of time to the project. They will also need to be clear about what they hope to achieve and be confident about exploring issues on an extremely wide canvas with the participation, as is suggested, of everyone involved in the life of the school.