When a combination of poor nursery supervision and inadequate council protection from a hazard leads to horrific accident
What happened?
A group of twenty children from Clockwork Day Nursery were taken on an outing to a park in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, in June 2006. The children, aged between four and eleven, were taken to the park by four nursery staff, one of whom was a female worker who had not been cleared to work with children. One of the children had special needs and required one-to-one care.
The children were left to play without supervision and ran out of sight of the staff. A number of the children came across a water spillway, which was channelling water from a nearby reservoir. The spillway was protected by a two-foot wall on each side and some of the children stepped down into the waterway in order to cross to the other side.
A child, aged 4 years slipped on some algae and was swept twenty-four metres to the bottom of the spillway and became impaled on a tree branch in his stomach.
Some of the children ran back to inform the nursery staff about the accident but the staff didn’t believe them and ignored their warning. A passer-by found the boy and carried him back to level ground before calling for an ambulance. The nursery staff only became aware that the boy was actually injured when the ambulance arrived. The boy underwent surgery, and was fortunate that the branch had not pierced any vital organs.
Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council, responsible for the park, were issued with an Improvement Notice, which ordered it to erect fencing around the spillway in order to prevent children from gaining access to the water.
In mitigation, the nursery said that the incident occurred when all four members of its senior management were absent due to exceptional circumstances. This had left it short-staffed and without anyone who was properly trained or knowledgeable enough to carry out a risk assessment during the trip.
Legal Outcome
In the January 2008 court case, Clockwork Day Nursery Ltd pleaded guilty at to breaching s3(1) of the HSWA 1974 and reg.3(1) of the MHSWR 1999. The company was fined a total of £21,000 and ordered to pay costs of £6779. The nursery appealed against the sentence but the decision was upheld at Crown Court.
Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council pleaded guilty to breaching both regulations at the same Crown Court hearing and was fined a total of £25,000 and ordered to pay £23,565 costs.
What can we learn from what happened?
The nursery said, in mitigation, that it was short staffed and had no-one properly trained to assess the risks. This sounds more like an admission than mitigation, but nevertheless demonstrates the importance of assessing foreseeable risks. The children running off was foreseeable, the boy being swept down the slipway was foreseeable, the boy being impaled by the branch less foreseeable, but that’s where the competence of the risk assessor kicks in.
Also interesting that the council were prosecuted for allowing anyone to be at risk from such an obvious hazard.
Source of Information
SHP Online