Safety
Staff, volunteers, contractors, and our children
The safety and well-being of everyone within our community is very important to us.
As a collective we have federal, state laws and Education NSW policies which we need to ensure we all work to.
COVID-19
Service NSW Registered Plans
Staff & Volunteers
For your own healthy and safety before doing any task you need to think whether you are happy to do it and if it is safe to do,
and if it isn't safe, don't do it!
Before any event you're volunteering at, you need to sign in (you can use your smart-phone), you are then covered by our insurance.
Protecting Our Children
Using this guide ...
CHECK 1 - Working With Children Check
Child protection is very important to us and we work within our state governments Office of Children's Guardian (OCG) laws & guidelines, particularly in relation to their Child Safe Organisations initiative.
The OCG is very aware of the value of volunteering to our society and as much as child protection is of the highest priority, they also don't not want to make community volunteering to difficult.
The OCG apply a number of exemption tests (eg do you have child at the school, will you have more than 5 days a year contact with children) to determine the potential risk to the children and from these tests we (you) can determine if a Working With Children Check (WWCC) is required.
The THS P&C keeps a central online registry of WWCC registrations and associated IDs.
When applying for a Working With Children Check on the first page you will see a section "Did you know?" which talks about the exemptions for volunteers.
If it is determined that you need a check (see diagram at the bottom of this page), then once you have your WWCC ID, please email your full name, date of birth and WWCC ID to pandcgeneralmanager@ths.community Your details will be verified via the NSW Working with Children portal, and we will then update the THS P&C secure central list (accessible by only the P&C President and P&C General Manager). You will receive a confirmation email once your WWCC has been verified.
Of course even if you are exempt you still may wish to obtain the WWCC ID and thus then not having to do the Education NSW Check (see below)
Any questions please email us.
Together making our community safe.
CHECK 2 - Education NSW Check
Education NSW has additional requirements (appendix 5 as per their guide) on volunteers and contractors that don't need a WWCC ID, but work with children and as a result of this, volunteers need to complete a declaration and provide 100 points of ID for inspection - a primary source worth 70 points eg. passport or birth certificate (plus marriage certificate if name has changed. A Drivers' Licence then completes it with 40 points for the secondary source.
You can complete this requirement at the schools reception office (where you sign-in) the first time you visit.
CHECK 3 - ADDITIONAL CHECK FOR PAID STAFF - Education NSW Requirement
Based on this matrix/guide at the bottom of this page, you will need to complete the following forms;
National Criminal Records Check (appendix 7 as per the guide)
National Policy Checking Service (appendix 8 as per the guide)
Declaration for child related work – Specified volunteer/child related contractor (appendix 11 as per the guide)
Staff Well-being
We take the staff well-being seriously and have structured the THS P&C organisation to use best practices, which includes the use of an employee assistance program.
Incident Reporting
If an incident that causes personal injury or property damage should occur we need to know about it, so we can:
Learn from it
If it caused property damage, make an insurance claim
If it causes personal injury, potentially report it to the authorities.
So please email incident@ths.community with any details and/or photos as soon as possible. Thank you.
Insurance & Safety Risk Management
Events
For each major event the P&C runs we need to complete an event safety risk assessment document* and also have to notify the P&C Federation as part the insurance obligations.
* You can select "File > Make a copy" or "Download as ..."
Once you have completed the risk assessment template please email it to pandcpresident@ths.community.
Construction
A risk management plan for workplace safety needs to be completed prior to construction commencement.
