Healthy Workplaces Award Nominations Open
The Healthy Workplaces Campaign is running the European Good Practice Awards, which aim to showcase positive examples of managers and employees who work together in a bid to prevent risks and accidents at work.
Enterprises or organisations can enter the awards, with those who can demonstrate strong leadership combined with active worker participation to promote health and safety in the workplace being the most likely to have a chance of winning.
Free “Mentally Healthy” Manager Training
Mental health in the workplace is a growing concern, and employers really benefit from taking action to minimise absences and unhappy staff by ensuring that their business is a healthy place to be. Healthy Working Lives are offering a free two-day training course for businesses in Scotland, called the Mentally Healthy Workplace Training Programme.
The training aims to “provide information and guidance to employers to help deal with workplace issues. The programme will enable employers/managers to create a greater awareness around mental health in their workplace and provide them with the knowledge and skills to deal with issues as they arise”.
The courses are delivered by Mentally Healthy Workplaces and Healthy Working Lives, and the next one takes place in Shetland on the 2nd and 3rd of October.
Ofsted Guidance to Help Pupils Achieve
In a bid to help schools to pass inspections with flying colours and assist their pupils to achieve all that they are capable of, Ofsted have produced three free reports.
Getting to good: how headteachers achieve success; The Pupil Premium; and Improving schools: a guide to recent Ofsted reports to support school improvement are all intended to help schools to meet the necessary standards to get 'good' or 'outstanding' reports when they are inspected. They are available to download for free on the Ofsted website.
“Elf 'n' Safety” Plant Pot Puzzle
In this week's “elf 'n' safety gone mad” story, the Daily Mail reported that families were banned from putting plant pots on the graves of their departed loved ones, “over fears a groundsman could be injured by flying shards of terracotta while mowing the grass”.
The article went on to explain how St Mary’s Church in Dedham in Essex had removed plant pots from graves, for fear that they would cause injuries.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have gone on to clarify the matter, explaining that the rules in question were nothing to do with them but were, in fact, the Church of England's own Churchyard Regulations.
A spokesperson from the HSE said, "Churchyard Regulations are decided by the diocese advisory board, with each diocese creating its own regulations, and as such are not reflective of existing British health and safety legislation”.