Putting The Myths Of Health & Safety To The Sword…Or, More Accurately, To The Shotgun
“How do you get away with it?” – With wild animals, spears and shooting, Mike Fairclough of West Rise Junior School shows you how playing with fire and embracing risk helps children grow
People often ask me how I can take children shooting with shotguns. Some wonder why I have a herd of water buffalo roaming around my school grounds. Why am I “allowed” to build a Bronze-Age roundhouse with my pupils, and teach them beekeeping and many other unconventional pursuits at my state-funded, mainstream junior school? Heads, teachers, parents, they almost always ask, “How do you get away with it?”.
There is a misconception within the teaching profession, the media and the general public, that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) – the national independent watchdog for work-related health, safety and illness – is against the idea of children being exposed to danger, and that schools are prevented from giving their pupils any experiences involving risk. (For the record, they have never banned snowball fights or conkers either. That’s another media-based untruth.)
Dame Judith Hackitt, The National Chair of the HSE, read about my school in the national press and approached me earlier this year to suggest that we send an accurate message to the teaching profession and parents about health and safety in schools.
We decided to show the nation in a hands-on way that taking risks and exposing children to danger in a responsible manner is a good thing to do, and that it is completely supported by the HSE. I designed a complete day of activities with the children for Dame Judith to engage in, and for the TV crew – there from the BBC – to film at the same time.
The experiential day out on my school grounds was designed to explore aspects of our Bronze-Age project and included children smelting tin and copper to make bronze, flint knapping, foraging for food (and eating it), dying and spinning wool from our sheep, lighting fires for cooking, making bows and arrows, using knives to make spears and making pots out of clay from the marsh and firing them next to an open fire.
Dame Judith came to the school and took part in every one of these activities alongside the children, before we all – Dame Judith, the Beeb and the children – jumped in the back of the school trailer and were pulled by a tractor to go feed the water buffalo.
En route we visited our bee sanctuary to see how the children actively take part in apiculture, and stopped off to see staff from the British Association of Shooting and Conservation (BASC), who were teaching our children to use shotguns.
Dame Judith was filmed with the children using these shotguns, making fires and feeding the water buffalo. She endorsed every activity we engaged in, and said that other schools should be embracing risk and danger in a calculated and responsible manner instead of using the HSE and misinformation as an excuse not to do so.
She explained to the press that coping with risk and danger is crucial to a child’s education, and that it should become a key part of the school curriculum, that children were suffering under an “excessively risk-averse” culture in schools which was not preparing them adequately for later life. She wants children to be encouraged to climb trees and play games where there might be an acceptable level of risk.
This should be enough for any teacher, school leader, governing body or parent to realise that no one is stopping children from engaging in the real world and embracing risk and danger. Let them bring conkers to school and play with them. When it snows, let them throw snowballs at each other. You could even join in! Let’s allow children to have the exciting childhood they deserve and stop blaming health and safety bans that never actually existed.
Mike Fairclough is headmaster at West Rise Junior School, near Eastbourne, and is the author of Playing with Fire: Embracing Risk and Danger in Schools.
