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Playlink > Issues > Risk It! - Changing public play spaces

Risk It! - Changing public play spaces

A joint PLAYLINK, Stirling Council conference, 20th February 2009.

Speakers

Kathleen Marshall, Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People

David Ball, Professor at Middlesex University’s Centre for Decision Analysis and Risk Management

Harry Harbottle, co-author of the guide to the European standard for the safety of playground equipment.

Sue Gutteridge, former manager of Stirling Council play areas and now a PLAYLINK Associate.

Bernard Spiegal, PLAYLINK’s Principal, Chairman.

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Chairman’s opening remarks

In his introductory remarks, Bernard set out PLAYLINK’s aspirations for the conference. They were to:

• explain the legal position so far as risk and play is concerned
• distinguish between value-based judgments and technical information
• clarify the role, status and utility of ‘Guidance’, whether from Government, the Health and Safety Executive, or organisations with particular interests
• counter prevailing myths and misperceptions about health and safety ‘requirements’, for example, the utility and role of industry play equipment standards (EN Standards)
• examine what is meant by play safety ‘experts’ and ‘expertise’ - who has it, what is its knowledge content?
• articulate the rationale underpinning risk-benefit assessment
• show and practice a risk-benefit assessment on various play features on a Stirling play area
• liberate play providers so that they feel better able to make informed, local, experience-based judgments about ‘acceptable’ levels of risk in play.

As conference speakers went on to demonstrate, there are in fact no legal impediments to creating challenging, beautiful play places. There is, rather,a culture of self-generated impositions and confusions that the Risk It! conference aims to counter.

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‘Playing it safe’

Kathleen Marshall, Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People

Kathleen placed the conference issues in the wider frame of Scottish childhood in general. She described how the policy priorities for her term of office – now coming to a close - had been based, as had been promised, on wide scale consultation with children and young people about their concerns.

From the consultation, the important concept of proportionate risk had emerged. Kathleen spoke vividly and passionately about the particular threat to ‘looked after’ children and young people in a society that seems to be becoming obsessively and excessively pre-occupied with ‘safety’ to the detriment of the exercise of both ordinary common sense and professional judgement.

Kathleen’s highlighting of ideas about proportionate risk, common-sense, and the role of judgment neatly adumbrated the more detailed examination of these ideas by the main speakers.

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‘Risk and play, a return to reason’

David Ball, Professor at Middlesex University’s Centre for Decision Analysis and Risk Management

David discussed risk and play under six broad themes:

• the ‘clash of cultures’: contrasting concepts of risk epitomised by, on the one hand, an industry-based view, and on the other, a sociological-based view;
• the shortcomings of an industry-based view when applied to the public realm - for example, when applied to parks and play spaces;
• that play is enmeshed in the conflicting interests of the Health and Safety Executive, industry standard setters, insurers, inspectors, the legal system and single issue campaign groups;
• what is play safety expertise? And who has it? Here the distinction was drawn between essentially technical considerations – for example, can a walkway take the weight of ‘x’ number of children? – and value-based judgments such as, should children be allowed to climb, say, trees?
• how to move from risk assessment to risk-benefit assessment;
• consideration of ‘where next’ for play.

In what follows, David offered a rounded account of the pros and cons, the scope and limitations of the various pressures and interests that bear down on play. It was not a question of identifying villains or casting particular interests as enemies. Rather, the necessary and urgent task was to understand, and take account of, the variety of objectives and values of individual agencies and interests; to notice that these were not always compatible with, and were sometimes opposed to, the aims and objectives of those committed – and under an obligation- to create rich and varied play opportunities.

David highlighted contrasting views about risk:

an industry-based view of risk - with its faith in management systems, its belief that safety is paramount, that risk should as far as possible be eliminated - results in play spaces rendered notionally ‘safe’ by engineering or factory style solutions such as barriers, gates, fences, safety surfaces, age segregation. This way of thinking has as its motif segregation and surveillance.

a sociological-based view of risk – starts in having faith in people, their capacity to choose and make judgments. This view sees children’s development as paramount and understands that children need risk in order to develop healthily and happily. Here risk is beneficial, for it stretches and strengthens children’s capacity to understand and engage with the world. This approach underpins more holistic, less prescriptive approaches to play space.

The industry-based view has held sway for several decades, and while there has been massive expenditure on the barriers, gates, fences and impact absorbing surfacing that this approach has engendered, this has had no significant observable effect in reducing risk and injuries. David concludes that while an industry-based approach might work in factories, it is inappropriate when applied to public places where human behaviour – infinitely variable and unpredictable - must be accommodated.

David then discussed the legal background to and requirements on providers regarding the safety of public play areas, drawing on Stevenson v Glasgow Corporation (1908), the Occupiers’ Liability Acts (1957 and 1984), the Compensation Act (2006) and the Health and Safety at Work etc Act (1974). From this material he drew out the underlying (and immensely sensible) approach that rests on the reasonable practicability of any measures taken, an approach that requires the balancing of the magnitude of the risk and the possible seriousness of the consequences of an accident against the difficulty and expense and any other disadvantage of taking a precaution.

It’s this ‘any other disadvantage’ that is of such importance for making judgments about risk in play. For in play, risk is beneficial; it is the absence of risk, or the automatic minimising of risk-taking opportunities,that creates disadvantage for children and young people. That disadvantage is the hindering of their healthy and happy development.

The practical application of this thinking underscores why it is essential to move from ‘risk assessment’ to ‘risk-benefit assessment.’

David pointed to the increasing mismatch between the traditional approaches to standards, inspections and risk assessments and the kinds of non–prescriptive and dynamic public play spaces that we now aspire to. He predicted the diminishing relevance of engineering-style standards and the inspections that are base don compliance with them, and the need for new kinds of assessors who know about children’s needs and behaviour and the benefits and risks of play.

A key element in David’s presentation was a dissection of what constitutes expertise so far as judgments about play and risk are concerned, and who has it. Here the role of independent health and safety inspections was discussed. Part of that dissection was to distinguish between:

1. a straightforward check that a particular piece of play equipment, specifically manufactured according to industry play equipment standards, met those standards (this was termed a technical inspection)
2. and risk-benefit assessment. In passing it was noted that where equipment made no claim to be compliant with the industry standard, inspecting it against that standard was futile, and in practice misleading.

In sharp contrast to technical inspection, risk-benefit assessment is not simply a technical matter, but a value-based exercise critically dependant on, for example, a view about children’s capacities, their resilience, along with the play providers’ own policy on the role of risk in play and their overall objectives for children’s wider well-being (including health). The historic – and continuing – danger is that the two distinct exercises are understood as one and the same thing. It by no means follows that competence in technical inspection is the same as competence in risk-benefit assessment.

Before turning to ask who has, or who could develop, expertise in risk-benefit assessment, David briefly outlined the prerequisites for implementing fully the risk-benefit approach. These are:

• a formally agreed play policy that makes explicit the overall objectives of the provider in making available play opportunities for children, including the need for risk in play as a benefit to children and the formal obligation of the play provider to create risk-taking opportunities
• the monitoring of provision in use
• review and reflection on experience.

In closing, David asked the audience, ‘who then is competent, or can become competent, to make risk-benefit assessments? ’

David’s answer:

‘It is you who are in this room.

You who know, or should know, your own provision, your own policy objectives, and the varied and local circumstances of each of your local play areas.

‘The responsibility for risk-benefit assessment is yours, and is not something which can be delegated to some external ‘expert’ who is unversed in local needs and circumstances, and has no more than a snapshot view of a play setting.

‘This does not rule out the utility of getting some temporary support if required, but generally there should be no problem in play providers implementing risk-benefit assessment for themselves’.

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‘Remember it’s about children playing’

Sue Gutteridge, former manager of Stirling Council play areas and now a PLAYLINK Associate

Sue began her presentation by reflecting on the dire state of UK public play areas, a state she attributes to the weakening authority, resources and skills of council parks departments and their equivalents and the parallel growth and increasing globalisation of the playground equipment market. And alongside this, the adherence to standardisation, regulation, control and stasis that is the very antithesis of play.

In this context, Sue posed the question ‘What’s the point of public play areas?’ She suggested that when well designed and well maintained they can form an important element of a spectrum of play opportunities and can be of value to parents, carers and communities as well as to children themselves. However, to redeem them we need to put what we know about children and play at the centre of our thinking about them so that technical considerations support and serve children’s play rather than obliterate it.

Sue considered how this might happen by looking both at rediscovering what we already know, and also at how, practically, this knowledge can be applied to the design and maintenance of public play areas.

In ‘rediscovering what we already know’, Sue referred to people’s knowledge and memories of their own and their children’s play and on how this kind of ‘common knowledge’ has consciously informed the values and principles underlying the marvellous public play spaces of, for example, Copenhagen and Freiburg and the school grounds of Berlin.

In thinking about the translation of what we know about children’s play to the practical design and maintenance of public play areas, she made the following suggestions, all amply illustrated to demonstrate how they would improve play experiences and opportunities:

• take down the fences;
• get rid of rubber impact absorbent surfacing;
• stop the dominance of manufactured play equipment;
• introduce planting and mowing schemes;
• most important of all: say good bye to the ‘make it bomb proof’ school of maintenance. Replace it with on-going ‘developmental maintenance’ based on a commitment to changing and changeable features that allow and encourage children’s control over their own play and add to the beauty of a site.

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‘The revised BSEN: opportunity or threat?’

Harry Harbottle, co-author of the guide to the European standard for the safety of playground equipment

Playground equipment and surfacing standards (BS EN 1176: 2008) applies to permanently installed public play area equipment and surfacing only.These standards have recently been revised. Harry looked at whether the revised standards incorporate the idea of benefits of risk as well as notions of risk reduction. He also reflected on the scope and application of the standard in relation to play areas that consist of more than collections of equipment.

In his presentation Harry covered the following topics:

• local authority duties with regard to public play areas;
• the concept of BS EN 1176 as just one of a number of tools that people responsible for public play areas should be using;
• the degree to which the revised BS EN 1176 incorporates notions of risk benefit;
• the necessity for, and thinking behind, risk-benefit assessment.

He described local authority duties with regard to public play areas as including the need to exercise reasonable care and to carry out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment .

There is no requirement to follow BS EN standards, and a local authority will certainly be at risk if it only follows these standards.

Harry deplored the over–reliance on standards, and the concomitant failure to exercise common sense and judgment. Not only that, it his view that many technical inspections of certificated equipment:

• are, on the one hand, simply superfluous
• whilst, on the other hand, surprisingly, key elements of equipment that should be tested, are not.

Items that should be tested, but generally are not, include: crossbars, foundations covered by wetpour, testing the static strength of single masted equipment, and the stopping performance of cableways. The reason: they require two people, they involve working at height, they involve too much time, trouble and cost etc.

Harry understands BS EN standards as ‘just one tool in the tool box’. Of equal importance are observation, guidance from other agencies, expert opinion, research and local knowledge, conditions and requirements.

All of this is the result of poor understanding and operation of the standards, not necessarily a fault in the standards themselves. And Harry sees in the serevised standards a growing acknowledgement of the benefit of risk.

This is made explicit in the latest version of the introduction to the standards which includes the following statements.

“Risk-taking is an essential feature of play provision….. Play provision should aim at managing the balance between the need to offer risk and the need to keep children safe from serious harm.

“In play provision exposure to some degree of risk may be of benefit because it satisfies a basic human need and gives children the chance to learn about risk and consequences in a controlled environment.” EN 1176:2008 Introduction

The benefits of risk are present too in a discussion about surfacing, as in:

“Grass is a low cost, readily available and environmentally friendly surface that is liked by children… it can… enhance opportunities for incidental and unstructured play.”

The need to consider benefits also informs comment on some types of equipment, such as cantilever tyre swings and multiple contact swings, where the standards allude to the importance of exercising judgment in balancing risk against play value and enjoyment.

Harry welcomes a wider risk-benefit assessment approach that takes into account the context, surroundings, changing and changeable features of public playspaces. Such an approach, integral to which is the exercise of judgment, will assist providers to strike a balance between offering children risk-taking opportunities, and the need to manage the level of risk so that children are not exposed to unacceptable risks of death or permanently disabling injury.

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Informal appraisal of Risk It! conference by PLAYLINK

This is a brief summary of our response to the conference.

Prior to the conference, whilst we had no doubts about the expected quality of the individual presentations, because what happens on the day has an unpredictable element, there was always the concern that the different contributions might not form a cohesive and coherent whole. Obviously, we knew in quite some detail the thinking and broad positions of the key speakers, but this alone could not guarantee a conference content that would be, in the words of one delegate’s post-conference comment, ‘coherent and persuasive’.

In the event, I think perhaps to our own and the speakers’ surprise, the day was indeed coherent and persuasive. If I was asked to sum up the conference’s key points whilst standing on one leg – this an aid to brevity –this would be it:

• to value people’s experience and capacity to make common-sense judgments about risk levels
• to help counter the lazy, uncritical acceptance of Standards, Guidance, the opinions of external experts, as though these had the force of law.

Having said that, the conference material would benefit from a little refining, mainly in terms of how it is introduced, and how it is summarised at its conclusion. This of course is the Chairman’s role. He has been apprised once again of his responsibilities.

Spreading the word

PLAYLINK and the speakers agreed that the Risk It! conference should be taken around the UK, preferably in collaboration with local authorities and other organisations. As with this conference, we would aim for delegates to do a risk-benefit assessment supported by the speakers and PLAYLINK.

Please use the link below to forward your comments and we will get back to you to discuss some of the ideas we have in mind.

Bernard Spiegal
PLAYLINK
8 April 2009

Risk-benefit assessment
Play policy
Play equipment

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