Risk Management with a smile! Getting an early start on health and safety

Employment Studies issue 22

Sally Wilson, Senior Research Fellow

‘You’re never too young to learn about health and safety’ according to the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA), which aims to make European workplaces safer, healthier and more productive. IES recently carried out an evaluation of EU-OSHA’s ongoing ‘Napo for Teachers’ initiative, developed with the aim of promoting basic health and safety knowledge to primary school children.

‘Napo’ is a friendly, animated character who gets into all kinds of mishaps and, in doing so, shows children how to keep themselves and others safe from everyday hazards. His perilous encounters at home and at work are all shown to be avoidable through taking care and following basic rules. The main aims of IES’s evaluation were to examine uptake of this initiative in European schools across the various EU Member States, and to survey teachers’ views on introducing health and safety in a classroom environment.

Focus on children and classrooms

In addressing the main evaluation questions, IES researchers were mindful that ‘Napo for Teachers’ represents a major departure from the usual activities of EU-OSHA, most notably with respect to target audience and environment: ie its focus is on children, teachers and classrooms rather than, for example, working adults in industrial settings. Therefore the Agency’s existing network of contacts and intermediaries across Europe (which include representatives of trade unions and employment ministries) are not ideally positioned to help them promote and disseminate teaching materials. A challenge from the outset therefore was going to be communications with teachers across the EU and alerting them to the existence of the initiative and its potential benefits. In recognition of this, the evaluation was set up to look at the factors that were instrumental to Napo’s ‘reach’ across Europe and to identify any national contextual factors that presented challenges.

Another important task for the evaluators was to look at the usability acceptability of the various ‘Napo for Teachers’ materials that EU-OSHA had produced, such as the free, downloadable lesson plans that have been made available on its website. These were developed in consultation with education professionals and cover topics that primary school children are likely to encounter at home and at school, including attention to safety signs, prevention of cuts and burns, lifting heavy objects safely, and the identification of risks and hazards.

Various video clips and creative activities are designed to explore the topics in an engaging yet informative way. In one example, ‘Napo’s Hazard House’, children ‘hunt the hazard’ in a chaotic ‘DIY’ environment in advance of a classroom discussion about how one might prevent these risks. Much of the content aimed at young children is language-free (Napo appears as a silent movie character); the cartoon content is supplemented by materials for teachers containing text translated into more
than 20 European languages.

Positive feedback for Napo…

Using surveys and interviews, IES researchers found that feedback from teachers across the EU who had used Napo materials in class was almost unanimously positive. Not only were the characters well-liked by children and the stories seen as appropriate for the intended age groups, but there was also widespread appreciation of the value of introducing OSH themes
to primary school-aged pupils. The toolkit contents were seen as high quality and appealing and the formats
were generally considered user-friendly for classroom implementation. Furthermore the humour and charm of the cartoon character were seen as key success factors, allowing serious subjects to be tackled in a light-hearted and fun way. Added to this there were several anecdotal reports indicating that messages had hit home. For example, one teacher reported that their students now say ‘don’t be like Napo’ to remind one another not to leave trip hazards on the floor in class. This suggests that the lessons have the potential to impact on behaviour in an immediate and practical way, possibly playing a role in accident prevention.

… but variation across Member States

As expected, IES found that the overall impact of the initiative varied significantly from country to country and was somewhat dependent on efforts at national level to promote and market the materials, highlighting the difficulties many EU agencies face when organising international campaigns for diverse audiences. Promotional events that involved teachers being introduced
to the resources face-to-face were very effective in encouraging uptake. Unsurprisingly, those in which Napo himself showed up (an adult dressed in a Napo bodysuit) had made the most memorable impact. Where awareness-raising efforts had been well-resourced, there appeared to have been an impressive level of local take-up, often by multiple teachers in the same  school.

Typically, Napo had been introduced in subject areas such as personal health and social education, science, and road safety. Some teachers had even creatively introduced Napo as an aid to learning a foreign language. However, there were also several areas of Europe (particularly in larger, founding EU Member States) where the initiative had failed to bed in. Despite widespread approval of the materials, some teachers struggled to find opportunities to use them and this was often linked to
national circumstances. For example, in some countries, challenges arose in relation to ‘fit’ with national curricula
and workload pressures on teachers.

Crossing of national, linguistic and cultural boundaries

Despite the logistical difficulties of resourcing and implementing EU-wide promotion of the initiative, IES’s findings show that the initiative has successfully crossed national, linguistic and cultural boundaries and that there appears to be potential for Napo to make a difference to young audiences he has yet to reach. The evaluation centred on teachers and EU-OSHA’s network of contacts, not students, so it is only possible to speculate on the impact on children’s day day-to-day life. However, it seems reasonable to assume that the safe and healthy habits they learn from Napo will serve them well throughout their lives.

It remains to be seen whether a new generation of young safety-conscious workers will emerge from European schools in the next decade or possibly a cohort of budding inspectors. Whatever the outcome, EU-OSHA has succeeded in making health and safety fun, which, given its traditional ‘red tape’ image, can only be applauded.

The toolkits are now available in more than 20 languages and may be downloaded from Napo’s website