Duty of Care and the Management Standards

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) says around half of all work absence is stress-related. This rises to over three-quarters in the five priority sectors being targeted by HSE, two of which are local government and education.

Worklife Support and the HSE

The HSE recognises that Worklife Support’s Well-Being Programme can demonstrate that schools are meeting the duty of care under health and safety legislation. In fact, the HSE invited us to partner with them to roll out their Management Standards for Work-Related Stress.

Work-related stress: your options - the HSE view

“Doing nothing is not an option. You need to take action to ensure that you are meeting your responsibilities under Health and Safety law.”

“HSE’s approach to state-maintained and secondary-school education has been to work in partnership with Worklife Support, who have a well-established and well-respected proactive organisational approach to tackling work-related stress in schools: the Well-Being Programme.

HSE encourages organisations to implement the Management Standards approach but considers the Worklife Support product to be ‘broadly equivalent’. Encouraging the uptake of the Well-Being Programme is a realistic way of getting education and Children’s Services directorates to manage work-related stress at the individual school level.”
Health and Safety Executive

Why use Well-Being to implement the Management Standards?

• The Well-Being Programme was specifically developed for schools. It is a sophisticated, tailor-made tool with which to carry out a risk assessment on work-related stress.
• The programme’s staff-perception survey is completely automated and paper-free. There is no need for staff responses to be collated and input manually and the results of the survey are automatically generated, saving you valuable time.
• Each organisation receives a powerful, detailed data profile that breaks down staff data into demographic categories and provides benchmarking against schools or organisations of the same type.
• The Well-Being Programme encourages a very high participation rate: on average, three quarters of staff in an organisation voluntarily take part in the survey.
• Confidentiality is inbuilt and guaranteed.
• Worklife Support provide support for ongoing work, helping to ensure that all changes generated are properly embedded and sustained.