Children First Act 2015

The written risk assessment.

The document everything else in the Children First Act 2015 depends on, and the one most often missing.

Why it comes first

Nothing else can be answered until it exists.

Your safeguarding statement has to specify the procedures managing each risk it identifies. Until the risks are identified, there is nothing for the procedures to answer — which is why a statement written before the assessment names risks the organisation does not have and misses the ones it does.

It is also what decides your training. The Act asks for appropriate information, instruction and training. Appropriate to what? To what the assessment found.

List the service, element by element

Not the organisation as a whole. Each activity, each place, each point where an adult is with a child.

Name the risk of harm at each

Specifically. "Safeguarding" is not a risk; an unsupervised changing area is.

Name the measure against it

What is actually in place, or what needs to be. This becomes the procedure the statement points to.

Write it down and date it

It forms part of the statement, and it is reviewed with it at least every twenty-four months.

Where organisations go wrong

Done in an office, away from the work.

The people who know where the risk sits are the people doing the job. The coach who takes the under-twelves knows which corner of the pitch nobody can see. The room leader knows what happens at collection time when a parent is late.

A risk assessment written without them will be tidy, plausible and incomplete — and the gap will be exactly where nobody thought to look.

Ask the people doing it

Service by service, in their words, before anything is written up.

Include the awkward ones

Transport, overnights, one-to-one coaching, online contact, and concerns about your own people.

Match each to a procedure

A risk with nothing against it is a finding, not an oversight to leave.

Answers

Questions we're asked most.

Does the risk assessment have to be written down?

Yes. The Children First Act 2015 requires the child safeguarding statement to include a written assessment of risk of harm to children availing of the service. An assessment held in somebody's head satisfies nothing.

Is a risk assessment the same as an assessment of harm?

No, and the two are often confused. Your risk assessment looks forward: it identifies where in your service a child could be harmed, so that procedures can manage it. An assessment of harm is what Tusla carries out after a concern has been reported, about a particular child. One is your obligation under the Children First Act 2015; the other is Tusla's statutory function.

What counts as a risk of harm in a risk assessment?

Any element of your service where there is a risk of harm to a child. That includes physical layout and supervision, one-to-one contact, transport, changing and toilet facilities, overnight activities, online contact, recruitment, and the handling of concerns themselves.

Who should carry out the risk assessment?

Whoever actually manages each part of the service, because they know where the risk sits. A risk assessment written by one person in an office will miss what the people doing the work already know.

How detailed does a risk assessment need to be?

Detailed enough that each risk it names can be matched to a procedure that manages it. If a risk has no procedure against it, either the procedure is missing or the risk was not real.

How often should a risk assessment be reviewed?

With the statement, at least every twenty-four months — and sooner if the service changes, if you start a new activity, or if an incident shows the assessment missed something.

Can we use a risk assessment template?

A template can prompt you, but it cannot do the assessment. The output has to describe your service, your premises and your people. A generic list of risks copied across is the commonest reason a statement does not hold up when somebody reads it properly.

Who you would be working with

Fifteen years leading Ireland's national child protection unit.

Senior Investigating Officer with An Garda Síochána, leading three national units: the National Child Protection Unit, the Sexual Crime Management Unit and the Online Child Exploitation Unit. Ireland's National Expert to Interpol and Europol on child safeguarding.

Safeguarding policy developed with Tusla, the HSE and three government departments. M.Sc. in Child Protection and Welfare, Trinity College Dublin. More about Michael

do what you love, safely