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LDomeney  
#1 Posted : 15 March 2024 13:03:44(UTC)
Rank: New forum user
LDomeney

I am looking for a tried and tested, easy to navigate, training platform for our staff H&S training.  We are a secondary school and looking for compliance management software that can deliver H&S training, asset managment, compliance checks, incident management etc...  We use Parago at the moment but have found issues with not being able to add a compliance check to an asset (not good for things like fire extinguisher checks!)  Any recommendations welcome.

A Kurdziel  
#2 Posted : 15 March 2024 15:17:33(UTC)
Rank: Super forum user
A Kurdziel

I have just had look at the Civica Education Operations system, formerly known as Parago, website.

It seems that this is the Dept. of Education approved platform for schools in England for “compliance” . the blurb says that it enables schools and colleges to “…streamline their risk assessments, share with staff to ensure instant access and accountability. Digitise and automate(!) any risk assessment and store in one central location, including COSHH assessments, ensuring everyone is up to date. Civica Education Operations helps school leaders to make innovative decisions, proving to be a holistic safeguarding software for schools.”

The words “streamline” and “automate”  worry me as we should not be making risk assessments  i.e. generic and meaningless but instead simply creating a repository of documents, that you create, and it just makes sure that they are upto date i.e. it is a document control system.

The question about  H&S training  similar is  : what do you want? Something that contains a  suite of training programmes , which your staff complete. It records they have done the training and  reminds them when refreshers are due. What training it supplies will vary in quality and relevance to what you do in your workplace.

Alternately you organise  the training material and the system simply records who has done it and  if they have passed any assessments for the training.

I have heard of all singing and all dancing packages which are a) expensive in the £10 000’s realm to buy and b) will required considerable development(££££’s) to make them suitable for your workplace and finally c) annual maintenance which is even more money.

There area lot of snake oil salesmen out there promising to “automate” and “streamline” H&S processes

thanks 2 users thanked A Kurdziel for this useful post.
peter gotch on 15/03/2024(UTC), MikeKelly on 17/03/2024(UTC)
peter gotch  
#3 Posted : 15 March 2024 17:46:03(UTC)
Rank: Super forum user
peter gotch

Hi LD, the snake oil salespeople have been out there for decades!

The difference is that they have evolved to pretend that technology can do everything for you, and make whatever aspect of compliance easier, often these days by getting AI to produce generic documents, training programmes etc etc.

As AK says, all very good in terms of document control management, but whether what is offered is suitable for YOUR staff, students, supply chain and third party stakeholders is another matter entirely.

So, you buy an off the shelf manual handling training package that tells you how to safely lift a cuboid box that weighs say 20kg. Very good if that is what the workforce are handling in a warehouse, UNLESS they have to go up in a platform (typically an "order picker") to retrieve some package from the back of racking.

However, perhaps not what is suitable when a pupil is injured and you might have to handle an "object" that weighs far more than 20kg, isn't cuboid, and which keeps trying to move!

...and the standard training packages generally tend to assume that the person doing the task is generally trying to follow the rules.

You are in a secondary school and sometimes the students will play up, unless your school is unique - or totalitarian in its approach!

I think what you need is a wish list of what you want in terms of:

(a) processes for the broad principles of managing H&S - risk assessment, active monitoring (inspections, examinations and audits), reactive monitoring (incident and near miss recording) and things out of routine such as maintenance and contractor activities ete.

(b) training needs 

In each case considering how much of each can be wholly or partly automated and how much needs to be bespoke to YOUR organisation.

....and much of this could probably be put together by one of the school's IT technicians IFF you tell them what you want to achieve.

Getting checks done on fire extinguishers doesn't need some all singing and dancing hi-tech software solution but could be done with a simple spreadsheet. 

This asset needs to be maintained at such and such intervals or when A happens. It needs to be examined at a different interval or not at all.....and so on.

....and it is very unlikely that the off the shelf COSHH package is going to cope when the students are going to mix chemicals X, Y and Z in the chemi lab to demonstrate a highly exothermic reaction - for the simple reason that the supplier who gives you a Safety Data Sheet for X may not know that you are going to mix it with Y and Z nor in what quantities.

thanks 2 users thanked peter gotch for this useful post.
MikeKelly on 17/03/2024(UTC), A Kurdziel on 18/03/2024(UTC)
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