Department of Education Responsible for Student Death

In December 2006 an 8 year old student drowned on a school fun day.

The NSW coroner recently found the NSW Department of Education and a swimming pool in the Blue Mountains were directly responsible for the student death.

The coroner’s findings should remind us of our responsibility to care for children. The standard of care teachers and therefore schools must give our children has to be very high. The law prescribes sending  our children to school where they are obviously in the care of others – we have no choice. Parents therefore need to feel confident with the processes and procedures implemented by the schools their children attend. Schools must keep our children safe from harm. If proper processes and procedures are not implemented and  someone is injured or killed the school will be held responsible.

The coroner pointed out that if the school and swimming pool had followed their own policies and procedures the drowning would not have occurred. The student death was avoidable.

This sad case should serve to highlight the importance of following procedures. The school in question failed to conduct an appropriate risk assessment for the fun day. There were also problems with the consent form.

Consent forms must contain detailed information about excursions. I pointed out problems with parents giving consent for excursions in an earlier post. Further, schools must conduct appropriate risk assessment for all excursions. Risk assessments are obviously more important when the activity has an inherent and acknowledged degree of risk – like visits to swimming pools.

The coroner made some recommendations. One of the recommendations was to establish a database for recording details of a child’s swimming ability. Another was that all primary school aged children be given colour coded wrist bands, denoting their swimming ability, to wear on such excursions.

The coroner acknowledged the costs, in both time and money, associated with establishing a database, but

No time or money can be compared to the life of a young child

Make sure the school your child[ren] attend undertake appropriate risk management assessments before you sign the consent form. Ask to see the documentation if it is not included with the form. In particular, in South Australia, ask to see the ‘Application to Conduct an Excursion‘ because the document provides a whole range of important information. Mind you, I have never seen this form before!

Parents don’t want to water down their own responsibility for the well-being of their children. I am sure we are all sick of seeing people trying to blame others for accidents. But, in cases like the tragic drowning  of the student in NSW, the school was found to be partially responsible for the death. That is, the death was, like I said earlier, avoidable.

It is our duty as parents to proctect our children – and when they are in the care of others, for example when they are at school or on school excursions making sure procedures and guidelings are carefully followed is part of our role.