ICEEPSY 2022: Making it visible – Digital application for safety and security in schools
Event:
ICEEPSY 2022 conference 6.-8. October 2022, Madrid, Spain.
Title:
Making it visible: Digital application for safety and security in schools
Authors:
B. Somerkoski, E. Lindfors, E. Luukka
Abstract:
It is typical that safety and security in school become visible only when we have lost it. In general, compared with home and leisure environments, schools are safe havens for pupils and for the staff. However, both intentional and unintentional injuries as well as bullying and near-miss cases have raised the need to collect the deviation data. As the society is taking giant leaps in digitalization, it has become possible to design mobile applications to report and monitor safety and security deviations in schools. The aim of this study is to explore the injury data reporting concept ONNI Notecrow. The application was designed especially for the learning environments. The study question is: What kind of school safety and security deviations are reported with the ONNI software?
From the earlier studies we firstly know that safety and security deviations in school are somewhat unpredictable in nature, connected with human factor issues or pupils acting against regulations; using structures or products in a way which they are not supposed to be used. Secondly, the deviations in schools are assumed to remain under-reported. Principal and school administration are in an essential role when bringing safety culture into practice. To engage and motivate both staff and the pupils to report more actively, the application should be easy to use and scaled to versatile devices such as tablets, PC´s or mobile phones. ONNI application enables quick deviation reporting during the school day. By deviations we mean risks, dangers, injuries, accidents, violence, bullying or problems at work processes.
This presentation gives a generic description of the software developed for reporting and monitoring the deviations in school. The software was partially developed in a co-design process.
By the time of the presentation at the ICEEPSY conference, 15 schools have piloted the software and the very first results will be visible. This study is a part of school safety and security programme ONNI, carried out in the University of Turku.
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