If you work in a Students’ Union, only you know how much work students union health and safety really takes. The question is whether you know your numbers or just your to-do list.
Try this. Write down how many risk assessments your clubs need. Not how many you’ve got. How many they need. Now hold that number.
One Students’ Union with 62 sports clubs mapped out a thorough starting framework and landed on 298 documents in total, 61 of them risk assessments. High-risk sport alone was 39. Nobody runs a pool plant room on a guess. Why run this on one?
How big is students union health and safety, really?
A to-do list is whatever is nagging you this week. The netball risk assessment that has expired. The new society nobody has visited. The tour form that is still a draft.
Numbers are different. They tell you how big the whole job is, and you can only plan against a size you know.
Here is what that starting framework looked like for the Union’s 62 clubs (49 on campus, 13 off):
- 61 risk assessments, one for each activity that needs one.
- 127 procedures, the “this is what we do” documents.
- 110 checksheet areas, the regular checks that prove it is happening.
- 28 policies and 53 records sitting alongside them.
Twenty-six areas were considered. Sixteen needed building and ten did not apply to this Union. That last point matters, because counting also tells you where to focus first.
People are surprised every time we show it. Fair enough. Nobody sets out to count.
To be clear, 298 documents is not the final word. It is a start, and a very good one. In our experience it goes much further than what we usually see in practice, but every Union will add to it, change it and trim it to fit its own clubs and activities.
Two areas take just over a fifth of the work
High-risk sport accounted for 39 documents. Travel and tours added another 27. That is 66 of the 298 between them.
These are the clubs where something can genuinely go wrong, so they are also the ones you least want to be guessing about. In that Union, 14 clubs were confirmed as touring abroad, with 8 more still to confirm. Picture the minibus leaving campus on a Friday afternoon. The paperwork needs to exist before it leaves, not after the first phone call home.
Our view is that this matters well beyond the Union office. Union clubs play, train and travel under the university’s name, which is why campus and sport leaders should be asking the same question as Union staff.
What does “enough” look like?
Nobody can hand you a definitive list, and we would not claim to. The benchmark is the law, and the HSE’s guidance is the plain-English way into it. In our experience that leaves many institutions building their own version from scratch, one university at a time.
The HSE’s five steps to risk assessment are to identify the hazards, decide who could be harmed and how, put sensible controls in place, record what you find, and review it. Employers with five or more staff need to record the significant findings. The HSE’s health and safety basics cover the rest of the starting point.
That is five steps for one session of one club. Now multiply it by 61 risk assessments and add reviews every time something changes. You can see why a shared drive, a spreadsheet and a lot of goodwill run out of road.
It does not have to stay that way. We have offered to work with BUCS, Scottish Student Sport and CUBO, free of charge, to help create the templates their members need. Fingers crossed, there will soon be one place to go, so every institution is not starting from a blank page.
Why students union health and safety falls between the chairs
Most of the work does not sit with one person. It sits with a club chair, a treasurer, a safety officer and a member of staff who has been asked to “keep an eye on it”. Committees change every year. If your club’s safety officer graduates in June, where does everything they knew go?
Ask that question about all 62 clubs and the answer is usually an inbox. Students union health and safety then depends on who remembers to hand over, and who was listening when they did.
The numbers fix some of that. A framework with 298 numbered documents gives each one a review date and a place to live, so the knowledge stays put when the people move on. Whoever picks up the role next opens the same document, with the same history, and carries on from there.
This time next year
Open one screen on a Monday morning in November 2027. Every document is listed. Green is up to date, amber is due for review within 30 days, red is overdue. You can see who has read what, and you have not rung a single committee member to find out.
That is how an operations dashboard works once the documents sit in one place, and the risk assessments behind it carry their own review dates. We build this for education organisations as well as leisure operators.
Now imagine the university, an insurer or a club asks what you have on file for a particular activity. You open it. You do not spend an afternoon hunting through email, and every change to it has an audit trail behind it. Students union health and safety stops being something you reconstruct under pressure and becomes something you can simply show.
The heavy lifting is the build and sign-off, and the framework we built for that Union came with a 16-week plan in four phases, then ongoing. After the first 16 weeks you are reviewing, not building. Start now, while the busiest weeks are behind you and the pain is still fresh, and this time next year you are the person who knows where you stand.
You could also read the stories from our customers to see how other organisations have made the switch from paper.
Monday Morning Action
Before you look at anything, write down your guess: how many risk assessments do your clubs need? Keep it honest, because students union health and safety only gets easier once you know the real size of it. Then list your clubs, mark the ones with high-risk activity and the ones travelling abroad this year, and count what you actually have. The gap between the two numbers is your starting point.
If you would like to see the full count for yourself, book a meeting here or email craig@opspal.com. We will take you through the framework in the meeting and send you a summary afterwards. If you come onboard, that framework becomes your plan for getting next year sorted.
