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Joanne Lewis, chair of the Education Group for the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health, looks at how we can make work a safe and positive experience
 Their first encounter with the world of work can shape the way young people think about employment, health and safety. In a recent interview with IOSH, comedian, writer and actor Hugh Dennis highlighted the significance of work experience as an introduction to adult life. “I think it’s really important to get experience of the workplace as quickly as you can,” he said. “It sorts you out a bit, because it’s very different from everything you’ve had – like the discipline required in the workplace and the fact that you have to be there. It’s not like school and it’s not like college.”
It is, however, a key part of a young person’s education, and Hugh’s comments underline the importance of the role early work experience – whether that’s two weeks during Year 10 of school, combining a part-time job with study, or a first full-time job after leaving college – can play in preparing young people for life as risk-aware adults.
Culture shock
Given the wide variety of experiences on offer and the differences between school or college and the workplace in terms of responsibilities, expectations and risks, your first experience of work can come as quite a culture shock. No wonder then, that young people present a unique health and safety challenge in the workplace. For a start, their lack of experience can mean that they simply don’t know about the issues many older workers think of as ‘common sense’. And without that experience or knowledge to base their decisions on, it can be easy for a young person to develop bad habits or dismiss the risks altogether.
Young workers might also behave in an immature way, taking risks to impress others. Or, despite looking like an adult, they might be physically immature, without the strength to carry out certain tasks safely. Even with a sensible attitude to risk, they could be vulnerable to peer pressure or feel too timid to raise any issues they’re worried about.
MP Diane Abbott experienced this timidity during her first job as a Saturday sales assistant, and stresses the need to protect young people in the workplace. “I didn’t feel able to stand up for myself,” she says. “Unless you have regulations, and standards, and organisations that can stand up for workers, many people will continue to work in conditions that aren’t really healthy and aren’t really safe.”
Legal duty
Happily, those provisions are now in place, as IOSH president John Holden, who negotiated manual handling and road safety risks without a care as a 14-year-old baker’s delivery assistant, observes. “When I was 14, perhaps we didn’t think specifically about the needs of young people in the workplace,” he says. “They were just somebody to do a cheap job – less expensive than paying an adult. Today, if you’ve got a young person at work, health and safety would be a priority.”
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) makes clear that employers have the same responsibilities for the health, safety and welfare of work experience workers as they would with any other employees, and there’s plenty of advice on offer for work experience providers and employers of young people. But there’s more work to be done. Prioritising health and safety for young workers isn’t just a matter of legislation – we need to educate young people about risk so it becomes their priority, too.
Bringing hazard awareness home
It’s not that young people are oblivious to risk – but many of the effects of poor working conditions aren’t apparent until much later in life, and that can make health and safety a tricky subject to tackle among teenagers. Quoting statistics and regulations is of limited use. What do statistics matter when you’re young, fit and carefree, and injuries are something that happens to other people?
It can be difficult for a teenager who feels strong and full of energy to believe that if they don’t follow safe lifting procedures now, they might be storing up spinal problems for the future. Or that if they don’t wear protective equipment in dusty environments, they might develop a respiratory disease that affect their quality of life further down the line. The health and safety information they receive needs to speak to them – to show them how what they do now can affect their future health and wellbeing. And while there may be no substitute for direct experience in the workplace, the task of bringing hazard awareness home to young people begins in the classroom.
“It’s very important that we highlight the importance of safety to our pupils before they go on work experience,” says Pete Glasswell, work experience coordinator at Birmingham’s Cockshut Hill Technology College. “They need to have a basic awareness of what they can and can’t do. For example, sometimes we hear about things that have gone wrong, or people who’ve asked youngsters to do something when they shouldn’t be doing it, and they get intimidated into that role. If they’ve got a basic awareness of health and safety issues in the workplace, what hazards there are and what harm they can cause them, then we minimise that risk.”
To make sure students are prepared for work experience, IOSH developed the Wiseup2Work website (www.wiseup2work.co.uk), containing free guidance, information and activities for under 21s, teachers, training providers, youth workers and employers. Resources include IOSH’s free Workplace Hazard Awareness Course (WHAC), which helps prepare Year 10 students for work experience and their first job. WHAC is an interactive awareness-level course that lasts 6-8 hours and supports the delivery of an entry-level qualification from the British Safety Council Awards. It’s free to download for teachers or anyone who delivers free or publicly-funded training – just go to www.wiseup2work.co.uk/whac.
Pete Glasswell helped launch WHAC in 2007, and now all students at Cockshut Hill Technology College take the course before they go on work experience placements. “WHAC is simple, easy to understand, and it’s in a language and format the students appreciate,” he says. “The kids get switched on very quickly to it. It highlights their common sense approach to things while showing them the background to that common-sense thinking.”
In fact, the course has helped employers to better understand their health and safety obligations too. “In certain circumstances,” says Pete, “the youngsters have gone in and raised the employer’s awareness of what their legal obligations and legal duties are, and overall it’s had an effect on the way we’ve approached work experience.”
Education is a life-long process, and the job of educating tomorrow’s workers will never be finished. But as Pete’s words suggest, the right tools and resources can help to give students the knowledge and confidence they need to negotiate workplace risks and make sure they stay safe and healthy – in short, to make sure the job’s a good’un.
The interviews quoted in this feature can be viewed on the IOSH YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/user/IOSHchannel
About IOSH
IOSH is the Chartered body for health and safety professionals. With more than 37,000 members in 85 countries, we’re the world’s biggest professional health and safety organisation.
We set standards, and support, develop and connect our members with resources, guidance, events and training. We’re the voice of the profession, and campaign on issues that affect millions of working people.
IOSH was founded in 1945 and is a registered charity with international NGO status. |
