Risk Assessments In Early Learning Services

Risk assessments are a critical part of ensuring the safety and well-being of children in early learning services across Australia. They help identify potential hazards, assess the level of risk, and implement strategies to minimize or eliminate those risks. The following article provides information on Key Steps in Risk Assessments, Mandatory Risk Assessments, Why Risk Assessments Are Necessary, Key Roles in Risk Management, How Often Do Services Need To Conduct Risk Assessments?, Risk Matrix, Completing A Risk Assessment and more.

Key Steps in Risk Assessments

Identify Hazards:
- Look for anything that could cause harm, such as unsafe equipment, environmental risks, or inadequate supervision.
Assess the Risk:
- Determine the likelihood of the hazard causing harm and the severity of the potential impact. Tools like risk matrices can help prioritize risks.
Implement Control Measures:
- Take steps to eliminate or reduce the risk. This could include repairing equipment, improving supervision, or updating policies and procedures.
Evaluate and Monitor:
- Regularly review the effectiveness of control measures and make adjustments as needed.
Document and Communicate:
- Keep detailed records of risk assessments and share them with staff to ensure everyone is aware of potential hazards and safety protocols.

Examples of Risk Assessment Areas

Excursions: Assessing transportation, destination safety, and supervision ratios.
Indoor and Outdoor Environments: Checking for hazards like sharp objects, slippery surfaces, or unsafe play equipment.
Health and Hygiene: Ensuring proper food handling, cleaning practices, and illness management.
Emergency Preparedness: Planning for fire drills, evacuations, and other emergencies.

Mandatory Risk Assessments

Sleep and rest, potential emergencies, excursions, safe arrival of children, and transportation of children—are icritical areas where risk assessments are commonly required. These assessments ensure compliance with the Education and Care Services National Law and Regulations.

Excursions and Transportation

For excursions and transportation of children, the regulations typically require services to conduct specific risk assessments prior to each instance of these activities. This means:

A general risk assessment for these areas is not mandatory to have in place at all times.
Instead, a tailored risk assessment must be completed before planning and undertaking any excursion or transportation activity.

This approach ensures that the unique risks associated with each specific activity, location, or transportation method are thoroughly considered and addressed.

Why Risk Assessments Are Necessary

Child Safety: Risk assessments identify and evaluate potential hazards in the physical environment, activities, and practices, ensuring risks are minimized or managed effectively.
Daily Practices: Embedding risk management into daily routines ensures that precautions are consistently taken to protect children and others involved.
Accountability: Risk assessments help prevent harm arising from:
- The environment (e.g., unsafe equipment or facilities).
- Actions or inactions of staff (e.g., failure to supervise appropriately).
- Systemic issues (e.g., inadequate safety systems).
Compliance and Best Practices: Completing risk assessments supports compliance with legal requirements and promotes high-quality standards in early learning services.

Key Roles in Risk Management

Approved Providers:
- They ensure that policies and procedures regarding risk management and assessments align with the National Regulations (r168 and r169).
- Responsible for establishing systems that promote safety and compliance.
Service Leaders (e.g., Nominated Supervisors):
- They oversee the implementation of risk management strategies and ensure all staff are aware of their responsibilities.
- Support educators and staff in conducting risk assessments and implementing control measures.
Educators and Staff:
- Actively manage risks in daily practices and environments by identifying hazards, evaluating risks, and applying control measures.
- Collaborate with colleagues, families, and children to promote an understanding of and involvement in risk management.
Children’s Collaboration:
- Encouraging children to engage in risk management builds their sense of ownership, understanding, and decision-making.
- It supports their development in assessing and taking appropriate risks, which enriches learning environments.

How Often Do Services Need To Conduct Risk Assessments?

Your service needs to focus on risk management on an ongoing basis, as it is a crucial and continuous process embedded in daily operations. To comply with the National Law, risk management practices should include:

Regular Practices:

Completing risk management and safety checklists to identify and address hazards regularly.
Maintaining and updating logs for premises, equipment, and resources to ensure they remain safe and fit for use.
Planning and carefully assessing new or risky experiences introduced for children.
Practicing active supervision at all times to prevent potential risks.

Specific Triggers For Risk Assessments:

Risk assessments should be conducted whenever:

The service environment undergoes a review, change, or renovation.
New experiences or materials are introduced to the children.
Excursions are planned, as well as when children are being transported by the service.
Policies or procedures requiring risk assessments are updated, such as those for emergencies or evacuations.
Potential risks are identified during the course of routine activities or observations.
Serious incidents or accidents occur, or a formal complaint is received.

Undertaking a risk assessment means evaluating or deciding which risks are significant and how they should be addressed. Risk assessment is one part of risk management. It involves critical reflection on the benefits and hazards identified within the service, such as an experience, excursion, practice, piece of equipment, or learning environment.

Risk Matrix

A risk matrix is a useful tool to use during the risk assessment process. It helps in identifying the level of risk by looking at the likelihood that a negative event may occur, and the severity of the consequence should it occur.

The risk matrix includes five levels of likelihood:

Rare - Very unlikely – the event may occur only in exceptional circumstances
Unlikely - Improbable – the event is not likely to occur in normal circumstances
Possible - Potential – the event could occur at some time
Likely - Probable – the event will probably occur in most circumstances
Almost Certain - Very likely – the event is expected to occur in most circumstances

When thinking about likelihood, the approved provider and service leaders should prioritise actions based on ensuring compliance with the minimum legislative standards, particularly those standards relating to the safety, health and wellbeing of children.

The risk matrix also includes five levels of consequences:

Insignificant
Minor
Moderate
Significant
Major

A risk matrix helps work out the priority of a particular risk. This can help approved providers, coordinators, service leaders, educators and staff to determine which risks to prioritise and address. Once your service has taken action to reduce, mitigate or eliminate the risk, it is important to reassess the level of risk to children, educators, staff, families and community members to understand the extent to which any action you have taken has reduced, mitigated or eliminated the risk. If the risk is still moderate or more significant, further actions need to be considered.

Completing A Risk Assessment

Step 1:Identify

The first step in completing a risk assessment is to identify the hazards and risks within your service. Be vigilant in monitoring your environment. If something that may be dangerous now or in the future is observed or identified, move to step 2 and document the possible hazard or risk.

Identifying hazards and risks can be done by:

completing daily hazard minimisation checklists
making hazard identification a regular topic at team meetings
proactively monitoring learning environments and equipment

Step 2: Assess

After identifying the hazards and risks that exist at your service the next step is to assess the risk of possible harm to children, staff and others.

assess the hazard
assess the possible harm, likelihood, consequence and seriousness of the hazard
identify any potential risks or benefits of undertaking the activity/experience for children’s learning, development and wellbeing

Document your assessment of the risk of possible harm.

Step 3: Manage

In step 2, the likelihood, consequences, seriousness and possible benefits of the identified hazards and risks were identified and documented.

The next step is to identify and introduce an appropriate level of control measures within your service to manage the risk or hazard. Control measures are strategies and actions to be implemented to manage, eliminate or reduce hazards and potential risks. Control measures significantly reduce the likelihood of the hazard or risk causing harm.

Step 4: Evaluate and monitor

After introducing the most appropriate control measure in step 3, it is now time to evaluate and monitor the risk of harm. Document your evaluations for each part.

Evaluate the risk of harm using the risk matrix

Is the likelihood and consequence of the risk of harm now reduced?

Evaluate the current risk or potential harm by documenting responses to the question:

• How well is the risk of harm managed or eliminated?

If the risk of harm is still high, then ask:

What alternative control measures can be introduced?
Is this the best possible outcome?

It is crucial to monitor and evaluate the risk of harm regularly. This will ensure that the risk of harm continues to be managed as low risk. The approved provider, service leaders, coordinators, educators, and staff should be vigilant in scanning and assessing the risk of harm within the service.

Excursions

Your service must have policies and procedures in place for excursions. This is a requirement under regulation 168 of the National Regulations. Your excursions policy and procedures should reference regulations 100-102. Regulation 100 states that the approved provider of a children’s education and care service and a nominated supervisor and family day care educator must ensure a risk assessment is carried out in accordance with regulation 101, before an authorisation to take the child on the excursion, referred to in regulation 102(4), is sought.

Regular excursions require at least one risk assessment to be completed within 12 months. This also applies to seeking authorisation from a parent or other authorised individual for a child to leave the service on the excursion. It is up to your service how and when they notify families and carers about attending these regular excursions.

Transporting Children

If your service transports, or arranges transportation of children, other than as part of an excursion, the service is required to have an additional policy and procedure in place relating to that transportation. These should include procedures for complying with relevant provisions on authorisations and risk assessments for transporting children. For example, if your service collects children from their home and transports them to the education and care service.

If a service transports children to multiple locations during their attendance, then regular transportation can refer to each venue and location that remains the same each week. This means, that for example, if a service takes children to a tennis court every Monday for their sport activity, then the service completes a regular transportation risk assessment and relevant procedure for the tennis court location. A separate risk assessment should be done for each of the venues, locations and days, whose circumstances remain substantially the same week to week.

Under the National Law, services are required to take into account the levels of supervision and ratios of staff and children. It is important to verify the number of children being transported at different points of the journey. Risk assessment and management strategies should include head counts, in particular when children are embarking or disembarking from the means of transport.