Model Safe School Programme - Saint Lucia

Background

The Model Safe School Programme (MSSP) is designed to assist Participating States with implementing processes that result in safer and greener educational facilities. Its Toolkit comprises a policy that can be adopted by governments and Ministries of Education, tools for assessing the level of safety and greenness of schools, a template Emergency/Disaster Plan that can be adapted to a school’s specific situation and hazard context, and, finally, a list of tools and guidance documents that can be utilized to create safer and greener institutions.

The Model Safe School Programme is congruent with the global strategic Comprehensive School Safety (CSS) approach to reducing risk in schools. The MSSP establishes an ideal, yet adaptable, approach to risk management at the school level that encompasses

1. the articulation of school safety policies,
2. the recognition of detailed and wide-ranging standards for school safety,
3. the identification of risk through assessment against the recognised standards, and
4. the implementation of interventions to address risk that are guided by the concrete knowledge generated through assessment.

The Model Safe School Programme (MSSP) and Toolkit for the Caribbean was endorsed by the CDEMA Council in 2015 as the vehicle through which the region would address school safety. School safety exists in a broader context of enhancing local, national and regional resilience through the mainstreaming of DRM in the education sector.

About the training

The overall MSSP training objectives are to:

1. familiarise trainees with the context for the MSSP and the assessment tools,
2. train on the utilization of the tool to assess risk in schools, and
3. train on the preparation of assessment reports.  

In addition to a sound approach to the MSSP theory and methodology, a hands-on learning experience is envisioned where trainees undertake all stages of the assessment and reporting process, including the development of recommendation reports and action plans. Consequently, the participation of schools, providing a real-life setting, is of vital importance for the achievement of the training’s learning objectives.

Furthermore, participating schools themselves benefit from this training, as using the safety standards and the application of the assessment tools provide Ministries and schools with a means of understanding the anatomy of the risk they face, thus enabling them to make fact-based decisions on the design and implementation of programmes to increase the resilience of school. The information generated by the application of the assessment tools allows for flexible action planning across various times scales (short, medium and long-term) and which considers the available resources and other unique characteristics of the implementing country.