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Playlink > Issues > Risk-benefit Assessment Form

Risk-benefit Assessment Form

Risk-benefit Assessment Form: Draft - 6 December 2009

‘Risk-benefit assessment is a suitable and sufficient risk assessment that brings together an analysis of both risk and benefits’

‘There is no legal requirement to eliminate or minimise risk, even where children are concerned.’
Managing Risk in Play Provision: implementation guide

Preamble

The form, with its introductory notes below, aim to assist play providers undertake risk-benefit assessments as recommended in ‘Managing Risk in Play Provision: implementation guide’. Its substantive purpose is, of course, to prompt and support a more mature, reasoned and reasonable attitude to risk in play. By which we mean, of course, that risk is an inevitable and necessary part of play. As PLAYLINK’s play policy makes clear:

Play providers fail in their responsibility if they do not create opportunities that allow children to explore and experience themselves and their world through the medium of play. This is done by offering children opportunities to take acceptable risks (that is, to freely undertake actions and involve themselves in situations that push against the boundaries of their own capacities) in environments that are challenging and stimulating. This process fosters the development of skills and is broadly educative in that it allows children to learn through experience what cannot be taught, what they have to find out for themselves.

PLAYLINK’s play policy, adopted by numerous local authorities, has been the subject of legal opinion.

This attempt to devise a risk-benefit form is prompted by, on the one hand, PLAYLINK’s need to undertake such assessments in respect of its own design work; and on the other, PLAYLINK’s work and contact with play providers wrestling with the implications, and practical consequences, of moving to this form of assessment. Many readers of this note will be aware that PLAYLINK has for many years worked with play providers, landscape architects, health and safety officers and others whose decisions have an impact on play provision to promote and value beneficial risk-taking in play. That work continues.

Risk-benefit Assessment Form

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