Education providers pursue safe-school status

The programme seeks to promote safety and prevent injuries by acknowledging and supporting schools that systematically track injuries and develop sustainable programmes to decrease harm to students and staff.

AL AIN // The first school to be certified as an International Safe School in the Middle East might just be in the UAE.

“It’s a programme that works with schools to certify that they are systematically working to reduce injury and promote safety throughout their school community for not only the students, but the teachers, staff and parents as well,” said Max Vosskuhler, chair for the International Safe School Network, who spent the week meeting government and school officials and introducing them to the programme. “And that they use data and properly evaluate that data to drive their decision making.”

The programme, developed in partnership with the World Health Organisation, seeks to promote safety and prevent injuries in schools by acknowledging and supporting schools that systematically track injuries and develop sustainable programmes based on the data to decrease harm to students and staff.

“We know that they keep lots of data for Adec, who is driving many school initiatives for doing audits in schools, safety audits and school-environment audits, so the data is being kept,” Mr Vosskuhler said. “Now it’s a question of making use of that data so that it puts forward proper programmes for whatever problems may exist, whether it’s traffic safety, bullying, falls, whatever the situation may be. And this is a programme that is collaborative.

“We’re not out to criticise or to say that a school doesn’t have something – we’re out to collaborate with them to make sure that they’re using international best practices that are proven to achieve the desired results.”

“It is recognition that they are doing something for the safety of the kids,” said Dr Michal Grivna, associate professor at the College of Medicine and Health Sciences at UAE University. “It is really a programme, it is evidence based and proof, so it’s quite important.”

Although the Adec school inspections have resulted in some data collection, Dr Grivna said more needed to be done by all stakeholders to track incidents of school injuries. There was no systematic recording of bullying, for example, or drug abuse in schools, he said.

“We need to find out what is the prevalence and then offer some type of measure of interventions,” Dr Grivna said.

All injuries need to be tracked so that appropriate preventive programs can be developed to reduce occurrence, Mr Vosskuhler said.

“We’re talking about a range of injuries, from minor injuries like scrapes and scratches that are taken care of in the nurse’s office, all the way to serious injuries that need to go to the emergency room and require hospitalisation,” Mr Vosskuhler said. “We look at unintentional, which would be accidents, and intentional, which is interpersonal violence, suicide.”

Schools need to pass a rigorous application process to earn the safe-schools designation. Only 172 schools from 18 countries currently hold the distinction. Another 350 are in the application process, which can take between six and 18 months to complete.

“It’s very important for improving safety,” said Dr Grivna. “It would be a very good example for other schools in the UAE, but also in the region, on how to improve safety for kids.”

Mr Vosskuhler, along with Dr Grivna, met representatives from the Abu Dhabi Education Council, the Health Authority of Abu Dhabi, the Ministry of Interior Child Protection Centre and schools to encourage them to collaborate in sharing and collecting data on injuries sustained in schools in the pursuit of having a UAE school become the first in the Middle East to be designated as an International Safe Schools.