Every school faces risks that present threats to successful delivery of expected services. School risk management helps identify and address those risks as well as increases the likelihood of achieving school objectives.

Strong school risk management can also lead to:

  • improved decision-making, planning and prioritisation;
  • more efficient allocation of scarce capital and limited resources; and
  • greater anticipation by the leadership team of what may go wrong, minimising crisis management, or preventing a disaster or serious financial and/or reputational loss.

As a central part of every school's strategic management function, risk management involves:

  • identifying the risks surrounding your school's activities;
  • assessing the likelihood of an event occurring;
  • putting systems in place to deal with the likelihood and impact;
  • setting an appropriate school risk appetite, cognisant of disparate stakeholders, and
  • monitoring the effectiveness of the school's risk management approaches and controls.

Four Pillars of school risk management success include training staff and stakeholders, understanding current maturity levels, conducting necessary workshops, and implementing software where necessary to better communicate risks and streamline established processes.

  1. For school risk management to be effective, all staff need to understand what is expected of them within the school risk management process and be properly prepared. Tailored risk management training programmes for all levels of staff within a school, can deliver an increased appreciation of the fundamentals of good risk management, demonstrate robust approaches through examples of good risk management practice; and provide a clearer understanding of how risk management operates.
  2. Once trained, to benefit fully from risk management understanding, schools need risk management processes to be embedded in day-to-day operations. Having a clear assessment of your school's risk maturity, benchmarked against peers, is important as it tells you where you are and how to improve, focusing effort on areas of most need.
  3. Risk management workshops are a highly effective approach to the identification of school risks. Interactive brainstorming encourages the consideration of school risks from different perspectives, ensuring a thorough and well thought-out school risk identification and assessment. Attended by Board members and senior management teams, workshops deliver a robust basis for the structured management of school risks, and support in the evaluation and prioritisation of risks.
  4. The communication of school risks and their mitigating actions is an important aspect of the process of embedding risk management into day-to-day school activities. A risk management software solution can help schools address this because it collates risks in a central repository and allows individuals to communicate risks as and when they are identified. Select a fully scalable and adaptable solution specific to your school's needs. Make sure the tool you select allows:
    • a comprehensive, single repository for all your school's risk registers;
    • highlighting of outstanding actions to support effective monitoring;
    • clear robust reporting for management and the Board; and
    • support for monitoring and testing of individual risks and controls.

For many schools the prospect of delivering better practice risk management processes into a school context is a daunting task. By focusing initial efforts on a Four Pillars approach, the task is made manageable and is more easily implemented. Strong school risk management helps increase the likelihood of achieving school objectives.

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