1.7 Risk Assessments

As part of our duty of care, we must complete appropriate risk assessments for our outdoor sessions. A risk assessment should inform and support our actions while we are out with participants, rather than being seen as a barrier to delivering outdoor learning.

The specific contents of a given risk assessment will depend on several factors:

• The location of your planned session
• Activities you have planned within your session
• Your participants, considering their age and abilities
• The likely or predicted environmental conditions, such as the weather and season

These factors will inform what risks you must consider, and what degree these risks must be mitigated and accounted for.

Local authorities, schools or other organisations may require you to complete their own specific risk assessment, and these should take precedence over your own risk assessment, when working with that organisation. The structure of such a risk assessment may be different to your own one, but should still include all the relevant hazards and risks, and how, when and where you will mitigate these risks or remove the hazard altogether.

Site Visits

As discussed in Roles and Responsibilities, an exploratory visit to the work site should be undertaken before the session is delivered, to be able to create a comprehensive risk assessment for that site and the proposed activities there. Consider also visiting a site after severe weather, as conditions may have changed since you last visited. For example, gale force winds may have blown over trees or left loose branches hung up in the canopy, which could dislodge unexpectedly.

Dynamic Risk Assessments

In addition to preparing a written risk assessment before the session, a leader should be continually identifying and managing changing circumstances immediately prior to and throughout the session, as part of a dynamic risk assessment.

Dynamically assessing for risks afford us the opportunity to notice hazards and associated risks that had not been identified as part of the initial risk assessment, or due to continually changing circumstances (i.e. weather conditions, behaviour of participants). It may also be the case that information regarding the specific needs of the participants (medical conditions, behavioural needs) had not been suitably communicated prior to the session, and will need to be accommodated within our dynamic management during the session. The process of dynamically assessing risk needs to become part of an outdoor leader’s method of operating. As risks and their mitigations are identified though this process, they should be recorded and contribute to improving the primary risk assessment as required. This may be a note made during the session, or during a review and record of the days session

Risk vs Benefit

Generally, outdoor learning is low risk. Participants should be encouraged to assess risks for themselves too, and this process can form part of the introductory discussion between the instructor and the participants at the start of a session. This is an opportunity to help learners to develop life skills in evaluating and navigating potentially hazardous situations.

It is important, therefore, to allow our learners to take risks provided the benefit outweighs the risk. Education Scotland produced the Outdoor Learning Risk Benefit Tool for evaluating these experiences for learners, and examining whether they are appropriate, justified and reasonable risks to present to learners.

‘Nothing Ventured … Balancing risks and benefits in the outdoors’ by the English Outdoor Council (2010) advocates for a balanced, properly managed approach to risk, where it is to be incorporated into outdoor settings rather than seen as a barrier.
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Creating a Risk Assessment

Within the WALT course, the process from the Scottish Government’s Going Out There framework toolkit  ‘Guide to Preparing a Risk Assessment’ has been adapted for application specifically within an outdoor setting. Within this guidance, involving staff and if possible, the young people taking part is advised.

In developing your session plan as part of the WALT assessments, you will be required to write a risk assessment. Refer back to this resource as guidance on what your risk assessment should contain and the level of detail we require.

The 6-step process for writing a risk assessments:

1. Provide a basic overview of the activity, and state the location of the trip/session
2. Break the session down into its different elements
3. Consider for each element the hazards it presents.
4. Consider who might be harmed for each of the hazards/risks
5. Identify control measures
6. Review and revise the risk assessment as required

1. Provide a basic overview of the activity and state the location of the trip/session

Write a short description of what the session will involve, including how participants will get to and from the site. Creating this overview will help you define the scope of your risk assessment.

Example, session description:

“A session about trees and plants for local primary school. Activities involve active games, and some basic foraging. Children will walk from school, crossing two roads.”

Additionally record the location of your session, as an Ordinance Survey (OS) map reference and/or What Three Words (W3W) reference. This should include the primary location of where your session will be based, and the closest point to which emergency services can access this location should they need to reach you:

Example, detailing locations:

Location: Sanquhar Woods, Forres
NJ 037 574 / popped.limp.reassured

Nearest Access Point: Sanquhar Woods Mountain Bike Trails Car Park
NJ 037 573 / videos.splints.coins

2. Break the session down into its different elements

These should include:

• Travel and transport
• Participant’s health and well being
• Venue: i.e. your outdoor location where you will be running your session.
• Activities
• Weather
• Emergency situations that may arise out outside of a specific hazard.

This not an exhaustive list, and you may be able to come up with other aspects that need to be considered, but this list is a good starting point. You may choose to consider some of the above suggestions together; what is important is that you identify all the hazards that exist.

3. Consider for each element the hazards and risks

Each of the above session elements can be considered as the individual hazards and risks they present. You only need to identify hazards that are probable and could reasonably be expected to result in significant harm, ensuring you have covered the main risks to life and serious injury. Depending on your circumstances, some or all of the hazards could be added to your risk assessment. Again, this is not an exhaustive list, but provides guidance for what might be considered within a woodland activity risk assessment:

Where there is overlap of hazards between different elements of our session, you only need to detail each hazard once.

Hazards vs Risks

Hazards are the sources or harm, and the risk, as defined by the Health and Safety Executive, is an evaluation of “how likely it is that someone could be harmed and how seriously”.  With in the scope of our risk assessment, to establish the risk, we will define the potential harmful outcomes of interactions with a hazard. For example:

In considering these potential outcomes, we can establish the risk the hazard creates. This is what we use to determine the suitable mitigation for each risk. Within your risk assessment, you should go through this process for each of the hazards listed.

Example, adding hazards and risks:

As an example of how we would include this in our risk assessment, some of the hazards and associated risks are presented below. This is not an exhaustive or complete example. 

As the group is walking to the woods, under travel and transport, we can add the following to our risk assessment:

Within the woodland setting, we can also add:

For this example, several of the planned activities involve active games:

4. Consider who might be harmed

For each of our defined hazards, must consider who might be harmed, which will further inform how we will mitigate or eliminate the hazard. The obvious group at risk are the participants, but also consider group leaders and other staff, and other members of the public that might be walking through your site. When considering your participants, pay particular attention to disabled participants, neurodivergent participants, inexperienced participants, and younger children.

Example, who is at risk?

For the planned active games, participants are at risk of running into one another, as well as collisions with members of the public if present:

Any unexpected weather will affect those leading the session as much as it will the participants:

5. Detail the control measures for each hazard/risk 

Record in detail the control measures you are going to put in place for each hazard to ensure they are reduced to an acceptable level. Where the hazard cannot be eliminated entirely, or doing so would be detrimental to your participants, the hazard must instead be “free from significant risk of death or permanent disabling injury” (Going Out There, p37). 

You also want to ensure any risk that remains is outweighed by the benefit to your participants (see Risk vs Benefit). You should also ensure you meet any policies, procedures and requirements of your organisation, and of the law. 

Where relevant, control measures should detail:

• Information or training for staff, e.g. first aid training, familiarity with lost child procedure 
• Information that would need to be conveyed to participants/care-givers/teachers, before and/or during the session (appropriate clothing and footwear; expectations/suitability of activities, etc.)
• Processes and procedures that can reduce the likelihood and/or severity of a risk, either as part of the planning process or in the case of an accident or emergency i.e. missing child procedure
• Special arrangements for participants with specific needs or requirements
• Staffing ratios
• Having alternative options, or a ‘Plan-B’ – this could be an alternative location should your previously chosen option become unsuitable.

Where we might have emergency procedures in place it is crucial that those responsible for using them (not just you) are aware of their contents and where to find them if needed. You don’t want the first time you read your missing persons procedure to be when you have somebody missing. 

We have two opportunities to mitigate the risks our hazards create: before and during the delivery of our session. Anything you do before the point of meeting your participants on the day of delivery falls into the former, and anything from that point onward, the later. Consider where to record your control measures by how best that information will inform your practice in delivering your session: i.e. to ensure you have sent our a kit list to participants record this as ‘before’; ensuring participants that might require an inhaler have access to it then record it as ‘during’.

Example, defining control measures:

To manage the associated risk of our planned active games, the control measures might be:

To mitigate potentially cold and wet conditions during delivery:

6. Review and revise the risk assessment as required

Set a date to review the risk assessment. Risk assessments are not a static document, though proper implementation you might potentially be adding or amending its contents continually. 

A regular review should be completed annually as part of your standard operating procedures. A review is also appropriate before this date, when something goes wrong, e.g. after an accident or near miss; a consideration from your dynamic risk assessments; or when any concerns are raised by participants. Should the scope of this risk assessment change – i.e. the location, or participant group changes – this would also be a consideration to whether the risk assessment requires amending, considering if the control measures are still effective. 

Further Resources

Template and worked example risk assessments can be found within the Going Out There Toolkit.  Template and  worked risk assessment examples, incorporating risk benefit assessments can be found on the websites of the Play Safety Forum member charities Play Scotland and Play Wales (same documents). Equivalent charities Play England, and PlayBoard NI, along with the above, each provide further reading around risk/benefit analysis, and supporting outdoor play more generally.