Incident reporting in schools: how effective are existing processes?

Incidents happen in schools every day, from a pupil who needs to leave the room to a medical emergency on the playground. How quickly the right help arrives depends less on the people involved than on the process they have to use to ask for it.

Many schools still rely on methods that were never designed for the job: a pupil sent to the office, an email marked urgent, a radio call the whole corridor can hear. It is worth taking a step back to look at how each one really performs, where the risks lie, and what a better process looks like.

How flawed are traditional methods of “requesting help”?

Runners

It is quite common to use runners for incident reporting in schools however there are two very important flaws we should consider.

I can remember being a runner in both my primary and secondary stage of education. I used to happily run down the corridors with a either a colour card or scribbled note to pass to the school office.  It didn’t take me long to work out what the colour cards meant and at the age of being able to read I knew why the teacher needed someone to come to their aid.

As adults, it can be difficult to step outside of our comfort zone, but isn’t that what we ask of every child when we give them the responsibility of getting urgent messages to the office? It can be distressing for a child tasked with delivering an urgent message, particularly if they know one of their classmates is hurt or needs medical help. In addition, children can be easily distracted from a task and as such delay your response to the request for help, which if a medical emergency could be life or death situation.

If we take a step back and look objectively at the use of ‘runners’ we see very clearly the risk to staff and students of potential delays in our response to what may be a critical incident as well as the serious risk this method poses to our compliance with the GDPR. Do ‘runners’ understand they mustn’t read those messages or discuss them with others because of data protection law?

Email

Email is the default way most organisations communicate, which is exactly why it struggles in an emergency. In a busy inbox, even a message marked urgent can sit unread while the recipient is teaching, in a meeting or away from their desk.

Think of it this way: outside school, nobody emails the emergency services. They call 999, because they need to know straight away that someone has heard them and help is coming. Email gives staff none of that:

• No confirmation that anyone has read the message
• No escalation if the first person misses it
• No quick back and forth while the situation unfolds
• Follow-up details push the original request further down the inbox
• Someone still has to read, prioritise and pass on every request

By the time an email has been received, read, triaged and the right people brought in, valuable minutes have gone. Looked at objectively, email is neither a fast nor a data-safe way to ask for help.

Walkie-talkies/radios

Often used to support both the email and runner solutions, radios have been embedded in the on-call and incident response processes of most schools for many years. There are a few problems with radios: they can be cumbersome, range-limited and have interference from outside your organisation, I spoke to a school who regularly has the local taxi firm on the same channel as them!

There is a more serious problem with radios, they broadcast indiscriminately, there is absolutely no way to ensure data privacy and that impacts how much they can be used in a serious incident. I have lost count how many times I have been sat in reception areas or in meetings and overheard things that I should not have been party to as a visitor to the school. When you’re dealing with an incident involving staff or students, the information you need to gather to triage and respond to the situation should not be public knowledge.

Another issue I see with radios is the lack of evidence they provide. There is a heavy reliance on the staff members responding to the incident to write up the appropriate incident reports later. I recently spoke to a school where a student had broken their leg on the sports pitch, the following day the school had to call the student’s parents to ask which leg was broken! When faced with stressful situations is it fair to ask staff to remember exactly what happened detail by detail as the incident unfolded or minute details that may have greater importance than realised in the heat of the moment?

And whilst we are relying on any or all the above methods, how is the member of staff that needs help coping?

If a staff member in the classroom is dealing with an evolving incident, be it disruptive behaviour that is escalating into violence or a medical emergency in which a student needs immediate specialist support, how, using the above relied upon methods can we respond quickly and effectively enough to ensure the best outcomes for the student involved and reduce the disruption to learning time?

According to the Edurio Staff Working Conditions and Wellbeing survey of more than 10,000 staff in schools and Trusts:

24% don’t feel safe in school

48% find it hard to get support with behavioural issues

65% experience regular disruption to learning

And what’s most frustrating about these statistics is the situation doesn’t seem to have improved in decades.

We all know that mental health and wellbeing of students and indeed staff is a major issue at present. Providing fast, effective help and support to staff members during incidents can surely help address at least some of the pressures they face and help them feel less isolated in their classroom, wherever that may be.

The solution

teamSOS is an incident reporting and response platform for schools and trusts. Staff call for help in one tap from any device, discreetly, and the right response team is alerted straight away, with automatic escalation if no one picks it up. Everyone involved can see who is on their way and message while they wait. The record builds itself as the incident unfolds, including audio from push-to-talk, so response teams no longer have to write it all up afterwards.

teamSOS will enhance and improve your existing safeguarding provision and create a safer learning environment for both students and staff.