Setting up a Nursery
Health and Safety
By Law, all nurseries must make sure they provide a safe and secure environment for not just their children but also staff, parents and indeed anyone else visiting their premises.
As someone considering setting up or running a children’s day nursery, your job will be to ultimately make sure your nursery is safe at all times. From making sure fire drills are understood by staff and children to ensuring play equipment is suitable and safe, good health and safety practices within your nursery will be vital.
You also need to remember that a good nursery is a clean one. From the personal hygiene of staff to making sure floors, corridors, walls, kitchen areas and toilets are spotless is essential. You will know more than anyone that when a parent drops off their child with you in the morning, they trust you with their safety and wellbeing. Making sure the spread of illness and disease is reduced at your nursery is therefore an absolute must.
Good health and safety also means providing adequate and suitable heating, lighting and ventilation so children and staff have the best environment in which to be educated, play and work.
Providing healthy lunches for your children also comes under the banner of health and safety and further information can be found on the Department for children, schools and families website at http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/schoollunches/infants.shtml or by visiting the Department for Education website at http://www.education.gov.uk/
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) continually works with other government departments and agencies to ensure that pupil health and safety, as well as that of employees, is properly considered and duly protected and further information on health and safety for nurseries can be found at their website by visiting http://www.hse.gov.uk/services/education/index.htm
The truth is, making sure the children at your nursery are protected whilst on the premises or away on field trips is perhaps the single most important thing you have to consider as a nursery owner.
For this reason, should you become an NCi Nursery policyholder, you will benefit from value added services including:
- access to a panel of risk management experts to help end-customers meet their legal and regulatory requirements
- valuation service by experienced surveyors
- risk management reports to help minimise risk
- guidance notes written by our experts on topics such as health & safety, training, risk assessment and more
- seminars on key industry topics such as ‘risk management’ and ‘abuse claims’
- free 24-hour helpline offering legal advice and counselling service for employees.
This is all backed by our insurance partners great reputation for settling swiftly and fairly – with 92% of our customers very or extremely satisfied with their claims service.*
Make sure you get health and safety right at your nursery and your chances of running a successful children’s day nursery will dramatically increase.
*Source: Claims satisfaction survey 2008, Ecclesiastical
