Safety

Along with safeguarding, safety is a golden thread throughout Scouts. It’s our number one priority to keep young people in our care safe from harm.

Progress a year on

We have made considerable enhancements to safety management in Scouts throughout the past year. We have:

Welcomed new staff into our Safety Team: helping us increase our support across the movement, so we can keep developing our safety culture.

Focused on core safety training for all members and line managers: by introducing new safety inductions specific to key roles.

Launched a local support pilot: to check the quality of our safety support and learn more about the way we deliver and embed risk assessments.

Reviewed our Policy, Organisation and Rules: including guidance and supporting templates. We then delivered briefings and training sessions in line with our updates. Specifically, we looked into air activities, climbing, cycling, sailing, and technology (particularly the use of radios).

Created a three-year safety road map from 2023-2025: to support the approach of continuous improvement.

The key pillars of our three-year road map are:

• Safety training and education
• Using safety data to create an insights dashboard
• Continuing to develop the safety assurance framework
• Improving how we capture and share best practice, as well as lessons learned
• Keeping our activities and programme safe, by continuing to work closely with National Governing Bodies and other partnership organisations
• Introducing specialist external advice and scrutiny.

The Safety Committee has procedures in place for gathering data about incidents. They consider the data carefully, so we can improve. It’s important to learn from experience and make sure we’re appropriately responding to incidents, so this approach is embedded in our culture and systems throughout our movement. What we learn is fed into reviews of our rules and guidance, and shared widely through our frequent webinars and member emails.

What’s next

In our three-year road map, we have a few key focus areas for 2023 under each pillar. We’ll:

Training and education

• Continue working on the safety core learning for volunteers, as part of the transformation programme.
• Achieve and maintain our agreed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for compliance training.
• Particularly focus on first aid training compliance.
• Support the implementation of the staff Learning Management System and effective utilisation of safety e-learning for key training requirements against roles.

Lesson learning and sharing best practices

• Enhance leading and lagging indicators to be more proactive about our current safety performance.
• Develop the volunteer safety advisor network to use knowledge and experience, and better share good practice.

Third party scrutiny and external review

• Establish a direct primary and co-ordinated authority partnership that’ll make sure our policy and procedures are checked and assured.
• Create a programme to review the policies, procedures and forms based on primary authority input and achieve assured status.
• Audit our current health and safety arrangements to find opportunities to improve.

Safety assurance

• Continue to support volunteers in specific locations where a need’s been identified through the use of our heat map data.
• Establish learnings and embed local assurance as a continuous programme.
• Continue to embed our continuous improvement culture.

Activities and programme

• Complete all planned activity reviews in 2023 and make sure they return to a normal schedule following the impact of COVID-19.
• Continue to support programme teams to deliver safe programmes.

Digital tools

• Continue supporting the digital team to make sure the new membership system launches with key safety requirements, such as permits.
• Working towards providing relevant safety compliance and performance information to volunteer line managers and local trustees, to make sure this data is readily available and integrated within our digital tools.
• Find out what tools we can use from the new membership system in relation to safety.

Safe Scouting programme

We’ve started our Safe Scouting programme of work. As part of this, we’ll begin a discovery phase to look at how we quality assure key safety tasks in our movement and digitalise some of our processes and resources. We’re doing this to respond to a growing need to show evidence of our compliance, as well as make our processes and resources as simple and easy to access as possible.

We’re aiming to help volunteers prioritise, being even clearer on which tasks matter the most and helping everyone feel confident about how to keep others and themselves safe.

We’ll continue working to drive and embed a culture of safety across the organisation – a culture where safety tasks enable exciting adventures and become a natural part of what we do in our planning and delivery processes (and where learning is shared).

Safety governance

We have a range of measures in place to keep everyone safe. These include:

Our Safety Policy: As part of our key policies, our Safety Policy clearly outlines the commitment to safety we expect from everyone in Scouts. It helps make sure everyone plays their part in keeping young people safe. We review the Safety Policy each year, and it’s informed by wider sector best practice.

Safety Committee: We have a Safety Committee that reports directly to the Board of Trustees. An external appointee chairs the Committee, and the appointee is a Trustee with working professional experience in health and safety management. The Safety Committee includes independent members, with experience in health and safety across several sectors. The Committee links to people responsible for providing leadership, and oversees the safety policies, procedures, and rules we give to our volunteers.

Each quarter, we update the Board of Trustees on safety matters, including incident statistics, training, and compliance reports.
Each year, the Board gets a full report of Safety Committee activities. They review a detailed overview of trends and statistics and take part in a specific safety-focused development session.