A risky business

Risk assessments aren't exactly my friend, I'll be honest about that. More like the awkward relative who comes to every family function, and you can't not invite them, because everyone expects you to, though really you'd all be happier if they didn't come, because they're boring and suck all the fun out of everything.

Oh they're useful, I can't deny that. Anything that forces you to think critically about the risks involved in what you're planning can't be a totally negative thing. But I still don't like them very much, and I think that's probably because at least 10% of the ideas I come up with get scratched at the drawing-board stage because the idea of trying to mitigate them in a risk assessment seems like far too big a headache.

Yesterday, I was introduced to the idea of a risk benefit analysis. This sounds fascinating to me, and it's basically based on the idea that children need risk to develop effectively, and so activities should be assessed based on the potential positives and negatives of the risk. Where the positives outweight the negatives, it's actually ok to go ahead and run the activity, even if there is some small chance that something might go wrong.

This strikes me as a very logical and level headed approach, and there's a part of me wondering exactly why I never thought about it that way before.

In some ways, I guess we've been doing it to some extent already. I know when I run a pond dipping day that there is a remote chance that a child might fall in. They might catch some pond illness, they might even get seriously ill. In the most extreme circumstance, they could die. But we do our best to make sure that none of that happens; our pond isn't deep, we impress on the children the importance of not eating or drinking anything that comes out of the pond, we encourage them to wash their hands when they've finished, we have life saving equipment nearby and we always have lots of staff on hand ready and willing (though probably not pleased) to jump into the pond after any children that do fall in.

If risk is about teaching children what they shouldn't be doing, then really we should be using our risk assessments as a chance to tell the kids why they shouldn't be drinking the pondwater. Explain to the children what risk they're avoiding, so that they learn they shouldn't put any pond water into their mouths, not just the water from our pond. In effect, the risks can be a benefit to the children without being a hazard.

If you're interested in this idea of the benefits of risk, then I recommend you have a read of Tim Gill's 'Nothing Ventured'. It's based on activites in the outdoors, but it raises some interesting ideas that I think apply to anything we do.