Managing risks and hazards at school

To ensure a healthy and safe environment for ākonga, staff and whānau, there needs to be good systems and processes in place for managing risks and hazards. It is recommended that significant risks and appropriate responses are the focus of these plans.

Questions to consider

Do you have procedures in place to identify, assess and manage risks and hazards appropriately?
Do you have a risk register?
Do you know what your risks are, including those that are significant or extreme?
Have you ensured that there is adequate training for workers, ākonga and your community to identify and manage hazards?
Are risks controlled and reviewed?
Do workers and others in the area know about the risks and the controls in place?

Content

Managing health and safety risks

Identify → Assess → Control → Monitor

Identifying risks and hazards

A process should be implemented to regularly identify and assess hazards and risks.

Hazard	Risk
A situation or thing with the potential to cause death, injury or illness. Can include a person’s physical and emotional behaviour.	The likelihood that death, injury or illness might occur when exposed to a hazard.

A hazard is not limited to an object and can be a situation, or a person and their behaviour both physically and emotionally. It can also be unpredictable and occur at any time.

Examples: slips, trips, and falls; vehicles and machinery; repetitive movement; stress, anxiety and burnout; bullying and harassment; illnesses; loud noise; hazardous substances

Identifying risks involves considering if a hazard is an actual or potential source of harm. Does the risk of harm increase with exposure to the hazard?

You should undertake an assessment in consultation with your workers, their representatives, and any other relevant parties such as parents and those in your wider school community. Risks can be identified through the usual course of work, doing group reviews, and during planning phases for new projects.

Assessing risks

A risk assessment takes into consideration factors such as the frequency of exposure to the risk, the likelihood of harm, and previous incidents involving that risk. A formal risk assessment enables understanding of what the significant hazards are present and can help ensure resources to manage the risks are focused on the most significant.

A risk assessment can help determine:

how severe a risk is
whether existing control measures are effective
what action you should take to control the risk, and
how urgently the action needs to be taken.

The information below can help you to assess the severity of the consequences and the likelihood of injury or illness occurring, and then to assess the level of risk for each hazard.

Assessing severity

The severity of the consequences can be rated by the degree of injury or illness that could occur:

Consequence	Description	Likelihood	Description
Insignificant	Nothing required	Rare	Only occurs in exceptional circumstances
Minor	Minor injury requiring first aid (ie, small cut or twisted ankle)	Unlikely	Does not happen often
Moderate	Injury requiring medical treatment (ie, sprained muscle)	Possible	May occur, but not often
Major	Serious injury – specialist medical treatment or hospital (ie, broken bone)	Likely	Occurs occasionally
Critical	Loss of life, permanent disability (ie, neck or spine injury	Almost Certain	A regular occurrence

Assessing likelihood

The likelihood of injury or illness occurring can be rated:

Likelihood Consequence

Assessed Risk Level	Risk Level	Actions
Low	If incident occurs, little likelihood of injury	Undertake with existing mitigations
Medium	If incident occurs, some chance of injury requiring first aid	Additional rules or considerations may be needed
High	If incident occurs likely that the injury would require medical treatment	Controls will need to be in place before undertaken
Extreme	If incident were to occur, it would be likely that death or permanent injury would result	Consider alternatives to the activity or additional significant safety measures required.

Assessing the level of risk

The level of risk will increase as the likelihood of injury or illness and its severity increases, as the risk rating table below shows. Once the risk for each hazard has been assessed, identify and put in place appropriate control measures, concentrating first on extreme and high risks.

Risk rating table

Risk level

Likelihood	Consequence
Likelihood	Insignificant	Minor	Moderate	Major	Critical
Almost Certain	Medium	Medium	High	Extreme	Extreme
Likely	Low	Medium	High	High	Extreme
Possible	Low	Medium	High	High	High
Unlikely	Low	Low	Medium	Medium	High
Rare	Low	Low	Low	Medium	High

Controlling risks

You must make decisions about what risk control measures to implement, in discussion with your workers, in order to minimise risk. Risk control measures can include substitution, isolation, engineering controls, administrative controls, using PPE, adjusting work procedures/processes, making changes to equipment of facilities in the work environment.

In some cases, workers may be able to eliminate or minimise the risk themselves. A positive health and safety culture can help enable workers’ confidence in risk control.

Monitoring and reviewing risks

Controls must be regularly monitored and reviewed to ensure they are effective. PCBUs are responsible for taking action to ensure health and safety by weighing up likelihood and consequence of harm occurring, and the availability and suitability of ways in which to eliminate or minimise the risks. Managing risks is an ongoing process and needs to take into account changes in the workplace.

Review of control measures may necessitate revisions in certain circumstances eg the control measure is not effective, changes in the workplace may create new or different risks, a new hazard or risk is identified, workers or a health and safety representative make a review request.

Keeping a risk register

Keeping a risk register is good practice to record information from the risk management process. For each identified hazard the following information should be recorded: