Compulsory safety education - a good idea?

Re: Compulsory safety education - a good idea?

Added: 10:46 15.08.2008

Following on from Roger Somerville's comment, I agree, but in addition to that I think the direction is very important because it could make matters worse if people get the wrong message or we don't get the emphasis right.

The phrase 'risk assessment' is almost seen as an evil, because of what the media has done and it really does affect people's approach to safety. We at Kodak try to work on the affective behavioural route, the Dr. Tim Marsh approach; it's a much better way then telling people how to act. We've had much better results by going down that route than the prescriptive methods. We've found that's it better to say why people can't do things, rather than just say no, don't do it. That way you get people involved and also the people that do it get to see what's not right.

We also have quite a lot of 14-16 year olds on work experience that come to our site an spend time with us, and one recently told me that he was told he couldn't play with conkers because it was unsafe, and if they were to, they'd have to wear goggles and gloves.

We thought we'd got away from that but it's still going on. School trips being cancelled, that sort of thing, it's a real shame - and it really winds me up!

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