As we
know, the Guiding Manual is full of rules which set the minimum acceptable
standards. The minimum number of girls
you can have and still have a viable unit, the minimum number of staff you need
for an outing with a given section, the minimum qualifications needed to run
certain activities. Although in every
case it is clearly preferable to have more staff cover than the minimum,
Guiding recognises that that the ideal isn’t always possible.
The
rulebook is based, as all rulebooks have to be, on what is considered
only-just-adequate for leadership teams which may have limited experience. Three adults with sufficient
training/qualifications is an adequate number to take 18 Brownies away for a week
– not generous, to be sure – but adequate.
But
when it comes to creating our risk assessments, or indeed, dealing with
situations which arise - sometimes the textbook solution is suddenly not
available. For instance, if on your
Brownie holiday a child falls and gets a cut which you feel needs stitches, you
might naturally plan to take her to the local GP surgery, Minor Injuries Clinic
or Hospital. But – by what means, and
accompanied by whom? Textbook says that
you shouldn’t have an adult 1:1 with a child.
But if two adults go with the patient (for instance, one adult drives
and another looks after the injured child en route), then that only leaves one
adult to take charge of all the other 17 girls single-handed. (It also presupposes you have a car on site
and a driver insured to use it other than the first aider, which isn’t
necessarily the case.) One sensible
alternative would be to call a taxi – that way you would have the taxi driver
as a second adult (an independent one at that) meaning you could send one
Leader with the child and keep 2 adults on site. On arrival the hospital staff, the other
people in the waiting room etc would ensure you weren’t left 1:1 - which would
appear the wiser option.
Or if
one of the adults on the staff happened to be the one ill or injured (or
amongst them) – you would automatically be down by one adult, and depending on
the illness or injury you might temporarily be down by two if the injured adult
needed to be looked after. Until such
time as that adult was either patched up and fit to continue, or taken home/to
hospital, you would be shorthanded. Once
arrangements had been made for the immediate care of that adult you would need
to consider your staffing position, and judge whether it would be appropriate
to contact the holiday adviser and discuss options – possibly securing another
adult to come and join the event as cover, possibly arranging to end the
holiday early and get all participants home safely - depending on the
circumstances which applied.
Fact
is, that no matter how many possible instances and circumstances the rule book
might list, sooner or later a situation will arise which doesn’t really fit
into any of the example scenarios in the book, and it will then be down to the
Leaders on the spot to act as they think best in the circumstances
encountered. You can only risk-assess so
far, some things which happen genuinely are not foreseeable, and cannot be
prevented by us no matter how much we assess and plan. For instance, my unit’s meeting hall is surrounded
by housing on 3 sides. On one side there
is high garden fencing/hedges, on the other two sides there is a high stone
wall between us and the neighbouring houses, too high for us to see over. One summer night I had organised relay races
on the narrow strip of grass which runs round our hall. I could hear that there were children playing
in one of the gardens beyond the high stone wall, but they were totally out of
sight to us, and us to them. It so
happened that as one of the Brownies was running down the side of the hall, one
of the children in that garden threw a bit of wood which had a couple of rusty
nails sticking out of it. The throw was
such that it happened to accidentally soar over the wall rather than stay
within the bounds of their garden as they had intended. And by some mischance, as it dropped towards
the ground it happened to fall in the comparatively narrow space between the
stone wall and the large expanse of hall roof beyond, and by some mischance it
happened just at the exact moment a child was running past that very spot, such
that it hit her on the head and caused a wound on her forehead which required
some stitches. The level of coincidence
involved in this – that the wood went over the wall instead of staying within
the garden, that it fell towards the narrow strip of grass rather than onto the
large expanse of hall roof beyond, that there happened to be a child running by
that exact spot at that exact moment and not a second before or after – would
be considered implausible by the average drama scriptwriter or critic. But it actually happened. I know, I was the Leader in charge that night
and I had to deal with the casualty and with the children in the garden.
I am
not for a minute knocking the Manual in saying this – either the concept of
having a Manual, or the current contents of it.
But I am saying that we must not and cannot rely on it alone to provide
us with all the answers for every possible scenario, every time. We have to be ready to utilise it’s contents
alongside our own sense and judgement, and be ready to fit the rules provided
to the circumstances we find before us, and work out the best possible solution
for our specific situation, complying with the rules as far as we can. Because we consistently find - that many
events which happen, in some way or another, are Not Quite Textbook.
