The Early Years Foundation Stage requires practitioners to keep children safe from harm while at the same time encouraging them to be active learners. This inevitably involves taking risks.
While some practitioners struggle with the dilemma of knowing when to let children have freedom and when to protect them, experienced early years team leaders say the key is to involve the children in assessing risks while helping staff develop the skills to know when and how to intervene effectively and swiftly.
'It is not a question of just keeping children safe,' says Shelly Newstead, managing director of consultancy Common Threads and author of The Busker's Guide to Risk. 'If you just keep children safe they will never do anything. Life is full of risks and children have to learn how to take risks.'
She says her guide encourages practitioners 'to weigh up the pros and cons of risk-taking and think about individual children in context, rather than just saying this is dangerous, we cannot possibly go anywhere near that. Its message is to encourage people to think about risk within the context of children's overall development.'
Kathryn Solly, head teacher at the Chelsea Open Air Nursery, believes it is important that parents understand their children will not be wrapped in cotton wool.
'When parents come around, I say this is what you are signing up for: on the coldest, wettest day your child is going to fall over and get muddy. Sometimes they may even hurt themselves. In the 13 years I have been here we have had very few breakages, but I can not promise that a child will not get hurt any more than I can promise that he will not trip walking down the street. The most unsafe thing is a flat area of tarmac, because they run and crash into one another.'
Mrs Solly, who runs courses on risk and challenge in outdoor play for the British Association of Early Childhood Education and at the University of London's Institute of Education, says, 'Risks are positive things. Hazards are negative. You plan your risk assessment to deal with hazards.'
By law, nurseries have to carry out a risk assessment. But Ms Newstead, whose organisation provides training on risk assessment, says, 'The Health and Safety Executive does not tell you how to do it, just that the risk assessment must be suitable and sufficient. I think that is helpful for people working in children's play because it enables you to say, "we did risk-assess this. We took into account the benefits. They outweigh the dangers, in our opinion."
'It is all about context. There are some days when you would not do some activities because they would not be appropriate. For example, if the children are hyper, that would not be the day to get out the woodworking tools.'
Children at Chelsea Open Air Nursery use glue guns and woodworking tools and play with ladders and ropes - but only after they have been taught on a one-to-one basis how to use the equipment safely.
Mrs Solly says, 'We have ladders just over a metre tall. A child of three or four could swing a ladder round and hit someone - but they don't. They learn to carry them and how to prop them up at the right angle. You will see them playing on the playhouse being firefighters or builders.
'With all these things, they get taught one-to-one the first time. Then they use the tools for an activity and are observed and then they get on with it. This is about process learning. It is about trusting the children. No child is deliberately going to set out to hurt himself.'
She emphasises that staff need to be taught when to intervene. 'Some have an intuitive ability, but some people need to learn.'
Further information
www.childcaretraining.co.uk
http://www.commonthreads.org.uk/
www.training-packages.com
www.early-education.org.uk
The Institute of Education, Department of Early Childhood and Primary
Education's CPD-courses for the Early Years -
http://ioewebserver.ioe.ac.uk/ioe/cms/get.asp?cid=882&882_1=17779
EYFS GUIDANCE
The Statutory Framework for the EYFS places an obligation on providers to conduct a risk assessment and review it regularly (3.33).
The guidance on play (1.22) includes the advice that, 'Through play, in a secure but challenging environment with effective adult support, children can take risks and make mistakes.'
The duty to balance keeping children safe with encouraging them to learn actively is further developed in the Principles to Practice cards:
- 1.3 A Unique Child - Keeping Safe says 'being over-protected can prevent children from learning about possible dangers and about how to protect themselves from harm.'
- 1.4 A Unique Child - Health and Well-being identifies one of the key challenges and dilemmas for practitioners as 'ensuring safety without stopping reasonable risk-taking.'
- 4.1 Learning and Development - Play and Exploration says 'practitioners always intervene in play if it is racist, sexist or in any way offensive, unsafe, violent or bullying.'
Learning and Development - Physical Development says practitioners should give particular attention to building 'children's confidence to take manageable risks in their play.'
CASE STUDY: POLLY'S DAY NURSERIES
'We ask the children open-ended questions to help them assess the environment they are in and to identify the risks,' says Anna Mead, proprietor of Polly's Day Nurseries in Stroud. 'The staff and children work together to identify potential risk. An example would be four children playing in the pop-up tent. It looks a little tight for space and the children are finding it difficult to carry out their play.'
A staff member in this situation might ask the following:
- How many children do you think should be in the tent?
- How many are in the tent?
- How is it making you feel?
- What should we do to make it less of a squeeze?
'We created boundary signs to support children throughout the nursery,' says Ms Mead. 'There are circular signs edged in red for no-go areas and green-edged signs with a tick to encourage the children - for example, to hold on to the banister when walking up or down the stairs.
'Children are encouraged to assess risks by being given reasons why they may be asked to do something. For example, asking children to put cars back on to the mat, they would be asked why it should be done - because someone may trip over them.
'A member of staff would intervene swiftly if a child was seen to be about to harm himself or another child. Using language appropriate to the age and understanding of the child, the adult would ask open-ended questions for the child to identify why he could come to harm. They work together to reach a solution. This way, the children gain a better understanding of why they were stopped and how to identify dangers. They can then carry on, if appropriate.'
Developing children's understanding makes repeating such behaviour less likely.
Ms Mead stresses, 'The key points are the nursery nurse's awareness of risk in any given situation; ensuring that staff are always fully focused on the children they are caring for; and that they have effective intervention skills - prompt evaluation, timely intervention and the quality of language and questioning techniques to explore the safety implications of whatever the behaviour might be.
'Senior staff consider safety issues before implementing changes. The process is: think, recommend, implement, observe and review, adapt.'
As part of their daily routine, children in the three- and four-year-old age groups at Polly's will:
- use knives to cut up soft snack foods
- select and self-serve their hot dinner from a trolley, taking the plate carefully back to their place at the table
- go down the stairs, holding on to the child sized banister in single file and know not to run or push
- put out the wet floor sign, if necessary
- scale the climbing wall, with the children following each other on a one-way system
- use the soft play gym, children being aware of space and danger when going down the slide and falling into the ball pit
- in all groups, use real child-sized cooking tools and china crockery for their home corners.
'In our under-two's group, the play room is laid out to ensure the children can coast between furniture, needing to take a step before supporting themselves again,' adds Ms Mead.
