Dfes Health and Safety of Pupils on Educational Visits, 1998

With reference to:

DfES Health and Safety of Pupils on Educational Visits, 1998

Health and safety: advice on legal duties and powers – for local authorities, school leaders, school staff and governing bodies, Feb. 2014

Principles:

We believe that pupils learn best when

their learning is extended beyond the confines of the classroom
they are active learners and are provided with opportunities to manage and take responsibility for their own activities, resources and learning targets
they are able to use, apply and enrich what they have learned in the classroom in real-world situations.

Aims:

To provide an integrated curriculum that maintains a strong relationship between learning in school and learning in the local community.
To secure equal opportunity and access to real-world learning experiences for all pupils.
To ensure that appropriate (individual pupil-focused) risk assessments are undertaken when necessary for learning in school and for all educational visits out of school.

Strategies:

The Linnet Independent Learning Centre will provide pupils with one to one support from a keyworker throughout the day. This will enable pupils to actively engage in a wide range of ‘workshop-style’ learning experiences with appropriate differentiation for each pupil’s needs and developing interests. Wherever possible links will be made between these workshops and real-world situations. Visits out of school will be routine and frequent events for all pupils. Where a pupil requires more than one adult to supervise when out of school, this will be arranged, so that educational visits (and visitors to school) is an entitlement for all our pupils.

Each child’s curriculum will reflect 4 distinct learning environments:

The indoor environment
The outdoor garden area, as an extension to the indoor workshop environment
The local community
The natural real-world environment through affiliation to Conkers Nature Reserve

Each keyworker will undertake pupil-specific risk assessments for the pupil with whom they work for each of these areas on a regular basis as the activities/resources within them change. Refer to Form 1: Assessing and managing foreseeable risks for children who present challenging behaviours.

Each keyworker will also undertake activity-specific risk assessments for the pupil with whom they work using Form 2, since workshops will sometimes offer challenging practical activities and resources that may present different sorts of risks for pupils operating at very different levels of skill and understanding.

There will be a more generic risk assessment undertaken by the Educational Visits Coordinator whenever pupils are taken into unfamiliar environments outside of school. This assessment will cover both the transportation of pupils to and from outside school environments as well as the possible risks during the visit itself.

From this generic risk assessment, each keyworker will consider the level of risk for the pupil in their care. Where there is a high risk, a keyworker will identify strategies to reduce this risk to at least a medium risk. Pupils will not knowingly be placed in high risk situations. Where there are medium risks, each keyworker will look to reduce these to low risk and to consider the balance of medium to low risk throughout a visit. A small number of medium risks may be tolerable and sometimes unavoidable in order to access a worthwhile activity (e.g. walking alongside a river).

Please also refer to the Educational Visits Risk Assessment guidance in the school’s Health and Safety Policy documentation.