What should risk assessments contain?

The minimum amount of information that you need in a risk assessment is:

• the hazards (things that may cause harm)
• how they may harm people
• what you are already doing to control the risks

YAC assessments also look at the learning benefits of an activity.

Managing risk within your YAC activities is about finding the balance between risk and benefit.

Your risk assessment then uses a comparison of the benefits (e.g. teaching a new skill, developing good practice) and the level of risk, to determine if the benefits outweigh the risk.

Meaning that with good control measures in place, you might decide to lead an activity that is of higher risk because the learning from the activity is strong.

We cannot create a completely risk-free environment. Indeed, this would stop us from providing meaningful experiences for our YAC members and is not in our members’ best interests: learning how to take care of yourself is an important part of growing up.

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Session Plan and Risk Assessment Documents

To help you, we have created a MS Word and MS Excel version of the session plan and risk-benefit assessment. Please note that the MS Excel spreadsheet has multiple sheets for each part of the form and is pre-formulated to help identify level of risk.

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Your Role as an Assessor

The person writing the risk assessment should have sufficient knowledge and experience to:

1. Consider the welfare of everyone in your group: adults and children.
2. Take account of children’s changing needs and aptitude as they grow and develop.
3. Should be mindful of needs resulting from disability that may make some children and adults more vulnerable than others.
4. Identify and examine each hazard and determine the level of risk.
5. Identify and examine the control measures and determine whether they are adequate.
6. Where controls are found to be inadequate, recommend improvement actions.

Some additional areas that you might like to consider:

• Food Safety
• Chemical and Hazardous Substances
• Fire Safety
• Using Portable Equipment Safely
• Manual Handling

Always be prepared to answer questions, be open to feedback and to share risk assessments if requested.

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Training Resources

The following MS PowerPoint training modules have been designed to help you consider different activities and ensure that each volunteer has basic awareness training. There are a series of discussion scenarios within the ‘writing your risk assessment’ module, and an ‘answer’ MS PowerPoint is also below highlighting some of the considerations that you might have discussed.

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Below you can view the training session, which covers the session planning and risk assessment documents found in the YAC Health and Safety Toolkit. It focusses on how to structure a session, how to undertake a risk benefit assessment, the role of the assessor and how to assess risk. It also discusses how to communicate this information to others in the volunteer groups, members, their family/carers and external partners.