Health and safety in education

Providing a healthy and safe learning environment

Discover how standards can help educational businesses protect the health and safety of their staff and students

Article

The importance of health and safety standards in your education business

It’s not just big corporates or companies working with obvious hazards that need to prioritize occupational health and safety (OH&S). Education business owners have just as much responsibility. Managing an academic institution, be it a university, college, or academy, in today’s competitive and complex environment can be a challenge. It involves being responsible for the health and safety of your students, faculty, and staff. An educational organization doesn’t start and end with the students and teachers. There are several governing bodies, charities, and employers that assist other members of staff. It is usually the employer that decides what health and safety rules should be executed. The employer could be a local authority, a proprietor, a trust, a charity, a Board of Governors, or a company. They are responsible for ensuring that potential risks to the students or staff are managed in a reasonable way. Standards deliver a platform from which to address these changing needs in a way that’s right for the modern workplace. To read more on the benefits of standards to your education business, click here. Why is health and safety important? Regardless of sector or type, even the smallest business must ensure its working conditions minimize risk and protect staff. Aside from non-compliance penalties, poor management of OH&S risks interruptions to trading and reduced productivity, as well as damage to customer perception. Larger, more established, organizations have generally been managing OH&S for many years and are likely to have invested significant resources into its governance from both a compliance and a social responsibility perspective. The typical big education businesses, such as a university, will also employ dedicated experts, teams – or even whole departments – to monitor compliance, implement processes and publish reports for management and stakeholders. For smaller businesses such as EdTech start-ups, the situation is usually quite different. Limited resource often means that hiring dedicated experts isn’t possible, so the responsibility will frequently be taken on by non-specialist staff, or a time-poor business owner. It’s also something that can often be deprioritized during busy periods. Education companies of all sizes can take a standards-based approach to manage OH&S. What role do standards play in health and safety compliance? Education organizations of all sizes can take a standards-based approach to manage OH&S. The process by which both large and small organizations can begin to manage workplace psychological health is also the same – by identifying primary risk factors and assessing what can be done to change the current working environment. Organizations can use the international standard BS EN ISO 45001 which provides a clear framework to benchmark and improve OH&S performance, as well as lay the ground for continuous improvement. Taking a standards-based approach can help small and medium enterprises and start-ups understand their responsibilities and create the right structures to efficiently manage staff and student health and safety and comply with the law. BS EN ISO 45001 also integrates seamlessly with other management systems standards, such as BS EN ISO 9001 (Quality management system) and BS ISO 14001 (Environmental management system). Like many other management system standards, BS EN ISO 45001 uses a simple plan-do-check-act (PDCA) model to help systematically minimize the risk of harm to all workers. It addresses factors that can lead to long-term health issues and absence from work, as well as those that give rise to accidents. PD ISO/PAS 45005:2020 is a document that gives guidelines for organizations, such as schools, on how to manage the risks arising from COVID-19 to protect work-related health, safety, and well-being. It is available for free download here. Improving mental health in the education sector Momentum has also been gathering in recent years for educational institutions to better recognize the issue of mental health. Improved transparency and increased mainstream awareness, means even the smallest educational businesses can’t ignore their responsibility when it comes to establishing a culture in which staff and students feel able to discuss depression, stress, anxiety, and other related concerns. Workplace mental health covers anything from an individual’s work schedule, timescales, and how tasks are organized, to flexibility and work-life balance, as well as the human relationships involved. A healthy educational environment manages all these dimensions to promote sustainable staff and student wellbeing. Finally, it’s worth highlighting that standards development has also been active in this area. A new standard –ISO 45003 – has been developed to tackle psychological health in the workplace. It supplements BS EN ISO 45001 to help small business owners appraise their current situation and guide the introduction of a management system for psychological health and safety in the workplace. With all this in place, education business owners can respond effectively to a transforming workplace culture, managing risk by promoting a safe and healthy workforce that reflects on society as a whole. Improve your education organization’s occupational health and safety processes by adding standard BS EN ISO 45001 to your collection today. Discover BSI Knowledge Get everyone in your education business involved in embedding a culture of health and safety. A BSI Knowledge subscription gives you instant access to the resources you need to improve your health and safety processes. The flexibility and visibility it provides of the best practices guidance enable you to get the most from your standards. Build your own custom collection of standards, or opt for access to our GBM07 Occupational & Personal Safety module and keep up-to-date with any relevant changes to your standards strategy. Request to learn more.