Risk-benefit assessment template
Foraging and tasting
Wild garlic, blackberries, elderflower. One rule sits above all the others and is never, ever bent.
Free. Edit it, sign it and use it on your sessions.
Nothing goes in a mouth until a leader has checked it. Say it every session. Say it to the adults too.
The honest control here is leader competence, and no ratio substitutes for it. If you cannot identify what you are picking, to species, with total certainty, then the control is not more supervision. The control is not picking it.
Benefits of the experience
Write yours before you write the hazards.
- Identification skills learned with an immediate, edible reward, which is exactly why they stick.
- Restraint and ethics. Taking only what you need lands far better in a wood than in a classroom.
- A direct, sensory connection to where food comes from, which for many children is genuinely new.
Hazards, controls and residual risk
Severity (S) and Likelihood (L) are each scored 1–3 and multiplied into a Risk Rating (RR). Low is 1–3, Medium 4–6, Significant 7–9. The final column is what is left after your controls, which is the number that matters.
| Experience / activity | Hazards | Associated risks | S | L | RR | Control actions | Risk after controls |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Identifying and picking |
|
|
3 | 1 | 3 |
|
Low (1) |
| Eating what is picked |
|
|
3 | 1 | 3 |
|
Low (1) |
| Taking from the site |
|
|
1 | 2 | 2 |
|
Low (1) |
The scoring key
Severity (S)
- 3 Death or major injury
- 2 Permanent disability or serious injury
- 1 Minor injury
Likelihood (L)
- 3 Occurs repeatedly
- 2 Will or could occur
- 1 Unlikely, though conceivable
Risk Rating (RR = S × L)
- 7–9 Significant
- 4–6 Medium
- 1–3 Low
What this template cannot know
Risk assessments are site-specific. This one is a starting point, so don't copy it unchanged. Before you sign anything, work out the following for your wood and your group:
- What actually grows on your site, and whether YOU can identify it to species with certainty.
- What the land is used for, and what has been sprayed on or near it.
- Your landowner's permission to take anything at all.
- Today's allergy list, against today's register.
Then put your name on it, date it, and set a review date. The assessment belongs to the person who signs it, which is you.
The paperwork around it
The taught form has a header before the table: the activity, the group, who carried the assessment out, the date it was written, the review frequency (annually is typical), the date it was last reviewed, a signature, and any other assessments it refers to. Your site assessment sits under all of your activity assessments, so name it here.
An assessment nobody has signed or reviewed won't stand up if anyone asks. At the review, use the near-misses you logged during the term to make next year's version better.
Write it once. Stack it on every session.
Keep your assessments as a reusable library, stack the right ones onto each session (the session keeps a copy of the version you used), and log the calls you make on the day, offline. Free for practitioners, never per child.
Ask for a template
Tell us the activity and we'll write it. You'll get an email when it's up.