Key activity 4: Support for
a culture of safety at school
Safe schools, especially those built through extensive community
participation, are the physical symbol of a community’s
commitment to their children. These commitments need to
be remembered and renewed regularly.
To achieve and maintain a culture of safety within and beyond a
school, communities should create opportunities to proactively
remind themselves about school safety. The possibilities are
many and ripe for creativity and student leadership.
• Safety committees and clubs. Under staff guidance,
students can form safety clubs to regularly discuss and
address school safety. Students can be quite competent
at identifying non-structural hazards from a checklist and
can even participate with school staff and community
members in maintenance audits. However, students
should not be made responsible for assessing or
addressing structural safety as they do not have the formal
technical training required to do so effectively.
• Disaster risk reduction curriculum. Geography,
science and social studies offer good opportunities for
introducing hazard awareness and safe construction
concepts. As part of their assignments, teachers can
have students explore how hazards are avoided or safely
accommodated in their community. Students can identify
hazard-resistant features of their school and interview
maintenance staff about how ongoing repairs continue to
protect the building.
• School safety events. Students can hold youth safety
rallies, inviting other schools to come and participate.
These events can be days for students to voice their
desire for safer schools to each other and the wider
community. Parent-teacher associations can organise
welcome events that orient incoming families to the
school’s commitment to safety. Students, parents and staff
can annually review and revise a community hazard map
and evaluate how changes have affected their school site.
Key activity 5: Scaling up and
promoting accountability
Even as school communities need to continue their
commitment to safety, implementing actors need to build on
good practice. They should identify successful examples of
safe school construction and enhanced community capacity.
To scale-up and promote safer school construction,
humanitarian and development organisations should:
• Make a public commitment. Commitments to safe
school construction affirm children’s right to safety and
education. These commitments also acknowledge the
organisation’s moral duty to ensure every school built or
retrofitted is safe.
• Educate funders. Proactive aid is more valuable than
reactive aid. Organisations should educate donors to be
more nuanced in their expectations. Rather than count
classrooms built with donor funds, donors should learn to
count only safe classrooms built and insist on appropriate
auditing practices that verify this safety.
• Share lessons learnt. Organisations should document
and share lessons learnt in community-based school
construction, especially noting how decisions at each
stage impact school safety and community capacity.
When innovation emerges, they should pilot these new
ideas and scale-up successful projects elsewhere. When
failures occur, they should analyse the problems and
identify necessary changes.
In Nepal, youth organised a student summit in 2012 and invited
students from other schools to join. Together they held a rally
to raise awareness about natural hazard risks and disaster risk
reduction. Photo: NSET.
SECTION III: POST-CONSTRUCTION
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• Enhance internal capacity. A commitment to every
new school being a safe school means a commitment
to knowing the extent of one’s expertise. Organisations
should work with external experts to identify their own
limited capacity and, where appropriate, develop training
to build it.
In addition to these actions, government agencies should
also:
• Establish policy tools and mechanisms for regulation
and funding. For communities to manage or build
safer schools, government agencies should provide
communities with appropriate technical support during all
stages of the process. They should also ensure funding
and accountability are tailored to a community-based
context and should develop targets and indicators for
monitoring progress toward safer school construction (see
the Decentralis ation of school construction case study in
Section II).
Students in Nepal work on different building models for earthquakeresistant design. Photo: Bishnu Pandey.