The Health and Safety Executive has announced that the number of people killed in the workplace last year reached a record low.

In 2009/10, only 151 workers died in accidents at work. This compares to an average of over 200 over the last 5 years.

Health and Safety training is an essential part in ensuring the continued safety of your workforce. The EduCare Health & Safety programme is supported by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH), and is designed to give both the employer and employee, in any field of work, a comprehensive, basic knowledge of health and safety in the workplace. It also ties in with your statutory duty as an employer to provide health and safety training.

You can read more about the EduCare Health & Safety programme here.

We’re always keen to hear what you think about our service here at EduCare. If you want to help us make our web presence better, please complete our Website Survey. You could even win £25 of M&S vouchers!

Click here to complete our Website Survey.

Bristol has become the first City in England and Wales to have it’s child safeguarding provision rated ‘good’ by Ofsted since the new inspection regime began last year. The inspection, which examined all areas of local safeguarding policy, including the police, council services and voluntary providers, highlighted the partnership working on a strategic and operational level, the strong child-focussed approach shown by professionals at every level, as well as leadership and management.

Ofsted, who are an EduCare customer, also found that continued work was needed in the city on workforce development and staff training in come areas – such as community dentistry.

You can read the report from Ofsted here.

A study commissioned by the Princess Royal Trust for Carers and the Children’s Society has found that more than 2 in 3 young carers are subject to bullying because of their role caring for sick or disabled parents. With over 13,000 children caring for a family member or friend, that’s over 8500 victims of bullying in schools. 39% of young carers said they didn’t think there was a single teacher in their school who knew they were caring for somebody. Schools need to ensure that all their staff are trained to spot the signs of bullying and know how best to prevent it.

NSPCC Preventing Bullying Behaviour, an EduCare programme written by the NSPCC with input from the Anti-Bullying Alliance, ChildLine, Stonewall and Save the Children is designed for anyone who comes into contact with children and young people through their work, voluntary or leisure activities. Click here to read more about the programme.

Click here to read the Guardian Article detailing the findings of the Study.

The volcanic ash cloud may be beginning to dissipate (though the volcano Eyjafjallajökull continues to vent ash at a lower level), but the economic impact of a week-long no-fly zone over much of the UK is still strong.

By now we probably all know somebody who had a meeting cancelled or a training session postponed, either because they couldn’t get to the venue, or because the person they were meeting was stranded in some far-off holiday destination.

However, using EduCare online training, there’s no need to travel – which can save not only money, but also disruption and stress caused by leaves on the line, snow on the roads, or volcanic ash in the airways.

EduCare online training is available anywhere, any time on almost any computer. We can offer cutting-edge technologies which allow you to access up-to-date reports on your staff’s progress and completion rates.

Over 11 million working days were lost due to stress-related illnesses in 2008/09, according to figures from the Health and Safety Executive. People in the UK work the longest hours in Europe, and stress can seriously impact productivity in every sector. Stressed employees are less happy, less productive and more likely to be ill.

EduCare has partnered with Samaritans, the UK’s leading charity on emotional health, to create the WorkLife Stress Management programme, which is designed to allow you to manage your own stress levels, and support colleagues and others around you who may be experiencing stress.

Click here to read more about the programme or to buy.

As you may have noticed, we’ve been having some technical issues in the last couple of days. On Tuesday and Wednesday, our website was offline, and this morning, the EduCare Online Learning System was unavailable for some hours. We’ve now managed to restore access to both the website and the EduCare Online Learning System.

As our website and our Online Learning System are hosted on seperate servers, this was a particularly unfortunate set of circumstances. The website issue arose early on Tuesday morning, when there was a hardware failure on the web hosting server. Our website hosting team then spent Tuesday and Wednesday repairing the failure while simultaneously working to restore the website to a backup server, and our website was live again within 36 hours.

Unfortunately, shortly after the website went live again, the servers that power the EduCare Online Learning System failed to reinitialise properly after a set of security updates. Our technical team managed to restore the server, and the Online Learning System was unavailable for only a few hours.

We’d like to thank you for your patience, and apologise for any inconvenience this caused.

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new website! We’ve been working hard for last few months on an overhaul of our web presence, and what you can see now are the fruits of our labour.

We haven’t changed our award-winning online training programmes, or the online learning system that delivers them, but we’ve developed a fresh new visual approach, in keeping with EduCare’s core message of simple and relevant communication.

A couple of changes you might have noticed:

- Logging in to the online learning system is still quick and straightforward. Just click ‘Login’ at the top right of the screen.

- When you first enter the site, you’ll see an animation. If you just want to quickly access a certain page, you can use the menu links above the animation.

We hope you like the new site, and that it contains the information you’re looking for. If you’ve got any comments or suggestions, feel free to email us at info@educare.co.uk.