D1: Explain How Legislation Can Support Strategies to Establish and Maintain Healthy, Safe and Secure Environments in Early Years Settings

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D1: Explain how Legislation can support strategies to establish and maintain Healthy, Safe and Secure environments in Early Years settings The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (HASAWA) ensures that all practitioners within an Early years setting follow particular guidelines and rules in order to ensure that both children and the adults within the setting are provided with a Healthy, Safe and Secure environment. As stated by Tassoni et al (2007) “everyone within a children’s setting, including student learners, has a responsibility for the health and safety of anyone who is there”. HASAWA is able to support early year’s settings to maintain a Healthy, Safe and Secure environment through ensuring that practitioners carry out Risk Assessments. As stated by Beaver et al (2008) “Practitioners must always be aware of potential hazards/possible dangers and take action to stop this from happening”. Because of this, it is essential that early years settings carry out Risk assessments on all new/existing activities, risk assessments indoors and outdoors, and also complete a Risk assessment if practitioners are planning to take children on an outing. By completing Risk assessments it allows the practitioners to identify any potential hazard and create a strategy or strategies to decrease the possibility of the hazard. For example, within my placement my supervisor carried out a Risk assessment when taking the children on a trip to the library. Within the assessment they ensured that they included the number of children who would be attending and the number of staff, parents and students that would also be attending. This is extremely important as the adult to child ratio changes when the children are outside of the setting. If the adult to child ratio was not taken into account when completing the risk assessment it could have resulted in the children not all being

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