9th August 2017 1:00
By Blue Tutors
From high-vis jackets on excursions and in the playground to cancelling sports days from fear of potential injury, schools are increasingly risk averse when it comes to children’s safety. While it is clearly important to safeguard our children from injury, Ofsted chief Amanda Spielman has highlighted the danger of mollycoddling children, saying it impedes their ability to develop “resilience and grit”. Creating an artificially safe environment at all times within schools and school related activities denies children opportunities to learn for themselves when caution is needed and how to assess potential dangers, leaving them wholly unprepared for real world experiences involving “normal everyday risks”.
Some argue that the rise in risk aversion to this level is unlikely to even be driven by genuine concern over child welfare, and puts enormous and unnecessary pressure on teachers to pre-empt and prevent every potential bump or scrape. Overly cautious policies have gradually worked their way into schools, like many other workplaces, as a result of health and safety regulation but also an increasing fear of legal action in the event of an accident. The Health and Safety Executive have clarified that there is in fact no regulation forcing schools to take actions like banning yo-yos, and reminds schools that time and attention spent enforcing these rules is taken away from tackling real dangers.
The trade-off between student safety and the opportunity to learn and play needs to be carefully managed and Ofsted’s head has called upon the organisation to "make sure that schools are properly focused on pupil safety but that it doesn't come at the expense of opportunities to broaden and enrich young minds", as well as telling schools to ensure they “distinguish between real and imagined risk”.