Page 60 - SyI Quarterly - Q3 and Q4 Edition 2023

Institute Community
Security Community

Dynamic Threat & Risk

assessment training in

children’s day nurseries

Daniel Pike MSyI

Tragically throughout history there have been child fatalities in
early years education settings and is a phenomenon that continues to the present day despite
stringent processes and procedures put in place within a regulated industry. When reviewing news
articles of UK fatalities, one hypothesis that can be drawn from these incidents is the lapse of
concentration of staff involved and lack of knowledge of threat and risk assessment.

The most common injuries in a setting are slips, trips and falls, poisoning and choking,
strangulation, drowning, and crushing. When considering causes of injuries within early years
education setting the common causes are untrained staff, failure to read a child’s medical needs,
not paying attention, mobile phone use and a facility not being childproof. It can be considered
that the use of threat and risk assessment by nursery workers and owners, could help prevent
these injuries and thus in turn prevent fatalities.

Dynamic risk assessment (DRA) can be defined as the continuous process of identifying hazards,
assessing risk, taking action to eliminate or reduce risk, and monitoring and reviewing, in the
ever-changing circumstances of operational situations, locations, or incidents. When considering
an early year’s settings, DRA can be implemented due to the rapidly changing behaviours and
actions of children and activities. Similarly, Threat assessment can be applied to a setting by
detecting and diagnosing the threat, deciding how to react, and taking the required action. For
example, a child waving a pair of scissors around a room would require mitigative action of
removing the scissors from the child. The immediate action of removing the threat from an acute
level of threat situation resulted in no injury yet could have been prevented through correct DRA.

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