I’ll make my declarations,I’m a qualified H&S manager though not in the business now,I have been and am still a member of the Institute of Occupational Health &Safety.
There was a similar thread a while back but from an American perspective.
The fact is everyone here is confusing cause with effect.
The reason that schools are appearing so over protective is as a direct result of the litigation culture that we have adopted from the Americans.
This is exacerbated by the plethora of “No Win ,no Fee” legal companies.
Even otherwise quite responsible parents get the glitter of greed in their eyes when their little darlings hurt themselves, however trivially, when under school jurisdiction.
And their attitude is very much one of “lets try it on we might get lucky and its not going to cost us anything”.
In the past Local Authorities have caved in even though they know that the allegations of negligence and responsibility laid against them are nonsense but it is cheaper to pay an out of court settlement then all of the legal fees required to defend the case.
As a result teachers loathe being put in the position where they might be blamed for kiddywinks non accident and L.A.s try to eliminate as far as possible any scenarios that might lay them open to blackmail,sorry accusations of negligence.
Of course the kids education and self reliance suffer immeasurably and where they’re so overprotected now they genuinlly have become,excuse my French,the biggest bunch of whining fucking Wussies we’ve ever seen in history.
And remember if you pay Council Tax or income tax its YOU who ends up paying both for the payout and the increased insurance premiums as a result of these actions.
The litigation culture has made its presence known in adult working culture as well.
In H&S inductions I had to tell grown adults things that a child would know and make them sign to show that they’d been told.
I would often get protests from the new guys about being told the totally bleeding obvious and I always responded that everytime someone had got a payout for doing something bloody stupid but which we hadn’t covered in the briefing the Insurance company would insist that we included it in our briefings from then on and STILL raised our premiums.
One example where someone tried it on (But I told him to fuck off) was when a workman tripped over his trailing laces and smashed his kneecap.
We had told him that he must wear steel toe capped boots for protection but we hadn’t told him that he had to do his laces up.
Even the cowboy legal firms didn’t try running THAT one up the flagpole.