Health and Safety

Unreasonable claims that numerous practices and situations are a threat to health and safety have long held sway, with few people willing to confront such claims. The effects of accepting those claims can be damaging in making parents fearful about risks in the normal everyday activities of their children, as well as reducing the children`s confidence in tackling the normal challenges of everyday life.

It has been pointed out that as society becomes increasingly risk-averse, parents limit their children`s freedom to wander within their local environments and encourage the children rather to play computer games indoors and watch inordinate amounts of television. Yet the risks of child abduction are as minimal today as they have ever been, according to some estimates; it is the perception of such risks that has widened to the point of fearfulness.

Children "wrapped in cotton wool" The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health, an independent body which advises the Government, stated recently that many schools and youth groups jeopardise children`s development by wrapping them in cotton wool and stopping them making their own decisions. Society has ended up with a nanny state where children are seldom let out (of the home), schools are too afraid to take pupils on trips and in some cases children are discouraged from playing football during school breaks.

A strict interpretation of guidelines means that children are not learning social and team-building skills. Instead they are becoming couch potatoes, frustrated and likely to find it hard to cope with problems in later life.

Many regular school trips in which youngsters learned at first hand about nature or the urban environment have been cancelled because teachers are not prepared to face what they see as the risks of an accident (or even worse, having to face disciplinary or court action if a child is injured). The likelihood of such incidents occurring is minimal. A Government Minister recently urged teachers to continue providing such outings, as they were a vital part of a rounded education; action was only taken against teachers when there was evidence of serious negligence, according to the Minister.

Risk part of everyday life In a recent incident, a young teenager slipped and fell to her death while walking with her family on a mountain hike. The parents courageously said that they would not have brought up their children differently; risk was part of life and part of everyday existence.

The national Health and Safety Executive has become so concerned about the misuse of "Health and Safety" by officials who try to restrict normal activities, that it sent a team to participate in a national conker throwing competition. (Some while ago a local council had cut down its beech trees on the grounds that a falling conker might injure someone and cause them to sue the council for compensation.) The only condition laid down by the Health and Safety team was that the conkers should be fresh (i.e. soft) and participants should not be free to choose old or hardened conkers that could cause injury.

Accident prevention body adds its warning From another direction, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents added its warning against "small-minded bureaucrats" who undermined genuine health and safety work. While Rospa`s work focuses on reducing the total of 12,000 people a year who die in accidents, at a cost to the UK of £ 25 billion, it is the (unofficial) health and safety "extremists" who prevent children from leading a healthy and robust life.

The head of Rospa pointed out that these extremists contributed to the misperception of health and safety, so that it came to be seen as restricting people`s lives rather than helping them to live better lives. A child`s minor injury resulting from playing in a challenging environment could be a positive necessity rather than unacceptable, as some people claimed.

The headmaster of a large girls` school said that the girls at that school were encouraged to assess risk themselves and learn what they can and can`t do, even if it does involve grazed knees and bruised noses. He criticised those teachers who hid behind health and safety rules to refuse to go on school trips. Health and safety were about protecting the child, not the institution. Risk is essential in a child`s education.