6 minute read
Risk is All Around Us Technology rides
RISK IS ALL AROUND US
2020 pushed risk to the top of the agenda for school leaders and was a cause of much stress and anxiety but technology continues to ride to the rescue and is playing an ever-more powerful role in its mitigation and management. This is a trend we should all be watching, John Fraser, Head of Education, Marsh explains.
COVID-19 gave independent schools throughout the country their biggest test yet when it comes to risk management and safety. School leaders adapted at pace in the face School leaders adapted at pace in the face of the unexpected to keep their schools, staff, and students safe; and despite the challenges that created, there are some inspiring learnings coming from the pressure to innovate.
As we look to build operational resilience for independent schools in the aftermath, many independent school leaders are asking similar questions. ‘How do I continue to make safety and risk management a priority, without increasing my overheads?’ ‘How do I improve effi ciency, without compromising improve effi ciency, without compromising on safety?’ ‘How do I continue to adhere to ever-changing government guidance, without adding additional pressure to staff?’ without adding additional pressure to staff?’
As schools are again challenged to do more with less, we are looking to those already leading the way in risk management and mitigation by leveraging management and mitigation by leveraging technology in their schools. Why is risk management a pain point for today’s schools?
The cost when things go wrong can be catastrophic: not only in terms of incidents that may occur, but the knock-on impact on a school’s reputation too.
However, it’s rarely one single action or failure that results in a full-scale incident. In the risk industry, we typically see risk as the sum of many factors: the little things that weren’t seen and weren’t escalated to the right person. Things that many of us simply don’t know to look for.
For the SMT, Bursar, COO or even the Head, having eyes on those small parts of their operation – especially in a large ecosystem of multiple sites or even a group of schools – is near-impossible. Real-time visibility continues to be a huge challenge; but at the same time, the demand for data-backed insurance risk profi ling is rising.
In a hardening insurance market and post-COVID era, information must be leveraged from school sites to protect against rising premiums and reduce risk.
But capturing it, surfacing it, and bringing it together to generate management information for the business – in a way that can be viewed favourably by insurers when an insurance broker presents a school’s profi le – is a demand many struggle with.
Hamwic Education Trust: A case study
Hamwic Education Trust has answered this challenge with the support of technology.
With 31 schools in its portfolio, the Trust had a recognisable operational challenge: coordinating the management of audits, checks, and compliance requirements across multiple sites with limited resources and entrenched paper-based processes. The result was ineffi ciencies, poor data, and a lac of visibility overall.
Deploying iAuditor, a digital inspections app, has proven the solution the Trust needed. The exibility and logic of the mobile fi rst app enables states ffi cer, Graeme Staddon, to design highly tailored templates to an almost granular level, mapping the unique layout, needs and ris profi le of each individual school site. Anyone completing an audit or check is guided by the app, ensuring no detail – right down to each fi repoint, light fi tting, or electricity socket – is missed. The Trust has created over 900 different templates within the app to date to meet the diverse and unique needs of its schools: and capture that all-important data.
In-depth reports are automatically generated and digitally surfaced within the platform, giving management full visibility across school sites and utilising the data to surface trends, issues, or insights. At any given moment, Hamwic Education Trust can identify its priorities or outstanding issues, using the information to make data-driven decisions and shape best practice throughout the Trust. Improving compliance and reducing risk
Quantifying and demonstrating a genuine risk management culture demands meaningful data. For Hamwic Education Trust, this has come in the form of scheduling of checks and inspections.
The ability to schedule either repeat or one-off inspections and push those to individual sites from a central point has driven up accountability across the Trust. ach school nows exactly what needs to be done and when; inspections are time and date-stamped electronically, alerting management if anything has been missed or where additional support is needed.
Mitigating risk by taking all the necessary preventative measures, all of which can be proven and demonstrated through analytics and reporting, goes to the heart of risk management.
As information has accumulated over time, the Trust has been able to build up an invaluable data pool and can consequently now move from being reactive to proactive and predictive.
Democratising safety and risk management
C too health and safety out of the hands of senior management like never before. s the fi rst responders on the ground, school staff needed to be empowered to take an active role in safety and encouraged to alert management to potential issues or observations before they escalated to the point of an incident.
Leveraging technology that can be made readily available on staff devices such as a tablet or phone is crucial to achieving this. Removing the pain of paperwork to be manually completed, submitted, reviewed and fi led with a digital tool that is easy to use can overcome some of the biggest objections from staff. Not only does it save time, one of the scarcest school resources, but it gets that information escalated to the right person when it matters most.
Technology alone can’t eliminate risk: but it has a powerful role to play in shifting those micro behaviours that have a signifi cant impact on reducing it. Empowering our schools and their staff to feed information from the point of risk upwards transfers ownership and drives awareness, improving safety at every level. That saves schools time, money and anxiety. What more can a school leader ask?! ●
JOHN FRASER leads Marsh’s UK Education Practice and has over 30 years’ experience working in the insurance industry. John is particularly passionate about the role insurance and risk management can play in supporting the mental health and wellbeing of pupils and staff . Marsh’s Education Practice is working closely with creators of Marsh’s Education Practice is working closely with creators of risk management software, SafetyCulture, who are seeing promising results for school clients using their agship tool i uditor. Every arsh education client regardless of si e has free access to ris management software via i uditor and the exclusive Marsh risk management expertise contained within it.
