How many times in years gone by have I complained about completing consent forms for the school time after time when one of my children was to go on a trip. Why cannot one form cover everything? Well now it can. Nearly two hundred pages of guidance have been reduced to eight. The government wants to encourage school trips and let teachers work in an environment were common sense prevails and the view of risk is mature.
This is wonderful news. Leadership of any kind, including being a teacher, requires the exercise of judgement, the acceptance of a degree of risk and due precaution to keep such risk to realistic levels. We, all of us, accept and protect against risk throughout our daily lives. The government is entirely right to free teachers and parents from excessive aversion to the risks of normal and engaged life. It is also good to see that the Health and Safety Executive have attacked the barmy risk averse culture, which includes fear of wet grass at Wimbledon, pointing out that these inane excuses and ludicrous prohibitions have nothing whatever to do with them or the laws under which they function.
Of course people must be protected from exposure to negligence and carelessness which endanger life and limb, but this has to be done with common sense and a recognition that there is a degree of risk in everything. To eliminate it altogether is make life hardly worth living.