When I am asked about what I love most about my job, the first things that come to mind are leading assemblies, teaching classes of children, leading staff meetings and watching school performances.
It won’t shock you to discover that I never really think of preparing and writing risk assessments. However, this year, writing those risk assessments is arguably one of our most important jobs as school leaders.
They’re tricky things to get right, so my starting point has always been to use a relevant template. But after that? Here I explain the checklist that I go through, in the hope that it will help others.
1. Identify your purpose and the key associated risks
Before writing a risk assessment, I outline exactly what it is I want to achieve. What are the outcomes that I want? When planning for classroom “bubble groups” for children, for example, the outcome we wanted was to ensure that the bubbles were able to remain socially distanced from each other.
Once we have agreed the outcome we wish to achieve, we then evaluate the potential “risks”. In this case, we looked at the points in the day (school entry, playtimes, lunchtimes, toilet breaks, hometime) when risks were increased. The key then was to evaluate our context and consider how we could limit the risks that we had identified. When you are outcome-driven, everything falls into place much more easily.
2. Clarity of communication
A risk assessment is only effective if it is well communicated and well understood. So I consider how easy it is to understand and the best way to enable all those charged with implementing it to have a clear practical understanding. We have found that the best way to do this is to have regular practical demonstrations for all staff to enable them to see what the risks are and how the risk assessment would be “lived out”.
3. Know your environment and your community
No two school buildings are the same and no two staff teams/learning communities are the same. I am acutely aware of this as, during the Covid-19 crisis, I was responsible for leading two schools.
As a result, I was responsible for writing two very different risk assessments, which had to take into account: the physical contexts in which I was working, the individual needs of the different staff teams and the needs of the different children.
It was a great lesson showing that you can’t just introduce a generic risk assessment or reuse an old one - an assessment has to be personalised to meet the specific risks in relation to your building, your staff and your children at that time.
Are there individual members of staff or children who need a personalised risk assessment? What are the feelings of your parents? We made the decision at one school to record a virtual learning walk across the school to demonstrate our risk assessment in practice. This was very well received.
4. Evaluate and review
Once your risk assessment is complete, it becomes a live document and may in some cases only be fit for purpose for a single day.
That is why it is so important to evaluate the effectiveness of your risk assessment; essentially, to what extent did the strategies implemented mitigate the risks in practice? How safe were the people involved and were all the hazards correctly identified? I make sure that I speak to participants to identify potential blind-spots. I consider where there are any circumstances that may have changed and how these changes might impact upon potential hazards and risks.
I also make sure that I consult the staff throughout the process. I worked very closely with union representatives throughout when making my recent amendments. This ensured that the risk assessment was a collaborative process and not something that was decided upon and “done to” the staff team.
Kulvarn Atwal is executive headteacher of two large primary schools in the London Borough of Redbridge. His first book, The Thinking School: developing a dynamic learning community, is out now. He tweets @Thinkingschool2
This article originally appeared in the 21 August 2020 issue
