Adequately assessing and managing risk is essential to protect children from harm and hazard.
Priority
Risk assessment and management is an essential part of the systems of control that help to prevent incidents from occurring. It is a crucial activity that helps prevent harm and protect children from hazards. Approved providers, nominated supervisors and family day care educators are all responsible for ensuring risk assessments are completed.
Risk assessment and management considerations
Approved providers and service personnel are responsible for ensuring the safety, health and wellbeing of the children under their care. This means doing everything possible to protect children from harm and hazards at all times.
Risk assessment is the law
Risk assessment is a requirement across the National Quality Framework, with specific considerations for risk assessments often prescribed in the National Regulations.
Specific risk assessment requirements in the legislation, include:
Carefully read the legislation—in many cases a risk assessment must be updated at least annually; they should always be updated when circumstances change or as a result of an incident or near miss.
There are numerous offence provisions for failure to undertake risk assessments. For example:
- to fail to conduct a risk assessment before an excursion (regulation 100)
- to fail to conduct a risk assessment before a service transports a child (regulation 102B)
Effective risk assessment and management
Most harms can be prevented by ensuring risks are properly identified, recorded, assessed, mitigated and continuously monitored. Having clear and comprehensive policies and procedures is critical, but this alone is not sufficient.
Approved providers must:
- proactively ensure that their staff understand what risk means and why it is important
- be vigilant to new risks and understand how to design effective control measures to minimise the likelihood of harm to children
- remember, even minor changes to the service environment can lead to major risks and activities such as sleep and rest, transporting children and taking children on excursions are inherently risky and need particularly consideration.
Risk assessment and management is a cycle. Potential harms and hazards must be:
- thoughtfully identified, considering children's viewpoints
- assessed to identify the risk—considering the likelihood that a risk may occur and the impact it would have if it does occur
- managed through appropriate controls
- evaluated after the controls are in place
- reviewed and monitored—incorporating lessons learned into ongoing risk assessment and other controls such as policies and procedures.
Risk assessment and management is everyone’s business and developing a culture of risk management is vital to ensuring safe environments.
Videos and resources
Risk management is definitely a mindset. It’s something that’s there to guide us each and every day and it’s very important. We‘ve had the scenario where educators think we’re going over the top, and then when something happened, they’ve said to me, 'Thank you. I understand why this is in place now'.