Alone with Eighteen Students: A Near-Miss in the Textiles Room
You teach a Year 10 textiles group of 18 students in a secondary school workshop. The room has six domestic sewing machines, one overlocker on a side bench, two steam irons on ironing boards, and a central cutting table with four shared rotary cutters and one A1 mat. The technician is off sick, so you are alone for a double lesson. During the lesson a student leans across a running machine to reach the thread stand; the needle hits the needle plate and a fragment flies past her face. Ten minutes later you see that the overlocker's needle guard has been removed and not refitted, an iron flex runs across the walkway to the only socket on that wall, and two students are trimming pattern pieces with a rotary cutter directly on a varnished table with no mat. The lesson still has 35 minutes to run and the students are at different stages of their tote bags.
1. Set out what you do in the first five minutes, in order, and what you record afterwards. Explain the reasoning behind each action.
Read the worked answer
First five minutes, in order:
- Stop the room with one clear instruction - tools down, hands away, stay at your place. A single instruction prevents the predictable second accident while attention is on the first.
- Isolate the energy. Switch off and unplug the machine involved, and switch off and unplug the overlocker and both irons. Electricity and stored heat are the hazards that keep acting after the event.
- Check the student. Face and eyes first; provide first aid and, if there is any doubt about the eye, send her to the medical room with an escort and inform the office immediately.
- Tag out the faulty equipment - 'do not use, fault reported' on the machine and the overlocker. Remove the rotary cutters from the table and coil the iron flex out of the walkway or take the iron out of use.
- Re-set the lesson to a lower-risk activity for the remaining 35 minutes: pinning, hand sewing, cutting with shears at supervised places. Cancelling outright loses learning time; restarting unchanged repeats the risk.
- Recover and keep the evidence: the broken needle fragment, the machine state, photographs of the flex and the unguarded overlocker.
Afterwards, record: an accident/near-miss report through the school procedure, the machine fault and maintenance log, and a notification to the Head of Department, the technician and the school's health and safety officer. Reason for each step: isolate the hazard first, treat the person, prevent recurrence, preserve the facts, then restore safe learning.
2. Carry out a risk assessment for the remaining lesson using the hierarchy of control, naming the specific hazards you would eliminate, substitute or control by other means.
Read the worked answer
Hazards identified: needle puncture and flying fragments at the machines; entanglement of hair, sleeves, lanyards or jewellery; cuts from rotary blades; burns and scalds from irons and steam; trips and electric shock from the flex and socket position; poor supervision because one adult cannot see eighteen students across three work zones.
Hierarchy of control, applied:
- Eliminate: no rotary cutting for this group today - use shears, or pre-cut the pieces; overlocker out of service until the guard is refitted and checked.
- Substitute: spring-loaded or self-retracting rotary cutters with a blade that closes when released; lower-temperature iron or a cordless iron where available; shears instead of craft knives.
- Engineering controls: refit the needle guard; fit a fixed guard on the overlocker; cable trunking or a covered cable ramp for the iron flex; sockets at bench level rather than across a walkway; residual current device protection; A1 cutting mats at the cutting station.
- Administrative controls: demonstrate the 'hands away, eyes on the needle' rule; ban lanyards and tie hair back; limit the number of students at each machine and at the ironing station, with a rotation board; supervised cutting station only; a maintenance schedule with fault tagging; portable appliance testing records for the irons; a written risk assessment reviewed with the class.
- PPE (last, not first): cut-resistant glove on the guiding hand at the rotary cutter.
Residual risk: with one adult and three simultaneous high-risk zones, the honest assessment is that the activity mix is not adequately controlled. The control is to reduce the range of activities - machines only, or cutting only - rather than to rely on vigilance.
3. Propose three changes to how the room and the scheme of work are organised so that the same set of risks is less likely next term, and say how you would evidence that they work.
Read the worked answer
1. Room layout with sightlines. Arrange the machines in a U facing the centre of the room so one adult can see every needle; put the overlocker inside that U rather than on a side bench out of view; place the cutting table near the entrance so students do not carry blades across the room; put the pressing station against a wall with the flex routed overhead or under a cable cover and its own socket. Evidence: a labelled room plan attached to the risk assessment, plus a walk-through check with the technician.
2. A tool 'passport' before independent use. Each student completes a short demonstration and a signed checklist before using the sewing machine, the overlocker or a rotary cutter - threading, needle change, hand position, blade retraction, iron safety. Until signed off, they use shears and hand sewing. Evidence: the signed class tracker, plus fewer fault-tagged machines and fewer near-misses in the log.
3. Planned supervision and activity rotation. The scheme of work is written so that no lesson combines unsupervised machine sewing with ironing and rotary cutting; lessons are staged - cutting and pressing in one session, machining in the next - and the technician's maintenance round is timetabled before practical weeks rather than during them. Evidence: the scheme of work showing staged activities, the maintenance log with pre-practical checks, and a termly review of the accident and near-miss records to see whether the trend falls.
Plus one control that is not optional: a fault-tagging routine. Anything found unguarded or damaged is removed from service immediately, recorded, and only returned by the technician. That single habit would have prevented both the missing needle guard and the unguarded overlocker reaching students.