BLACKPOOL AND THE FYLDE COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIP REVIEW 2021
Safety Culture and Cadets: assessing cadet values relating to safety and the impact of teaching and learning strategies on those attitudes Alex Barlow
Abstract Safety culture has been a staple of safety literature for around a quarter of a century and soft skills are an often-undervalued aspect of a technical field such as the merchant navy. This report set out to establish the attitudes of merchant navy cadets towards safety culture and to examine the impact teaching safety culture would have on those attitudes. The investigation reviewed a wide range of literature on safety culture and teaching, learning and assessment strategies. Data collection was completed in the form of a rating-scale survey and focus groups on selected students who would study one of two educational packages that taught about safety culture using different strategies. A follow-up focus group sought to identify any shifts resulting from the educational package. Whilst the initial sample size is too small to draw widely applicable conclusions, it was clear that there was development in the attitudes of some participants. There was also a range of design improvements that would aid data collection for a wider-reaching data collection approach that would have the opportunity to gather more widely applicable findings.
Background Maritime Education and Training (MET) programmes must cover many areas of competency prescribe by the International Maritime Organization (IMO, 2010); this includes how to participate in and manage operations safely. The UK’s merchant navy officer training programme prescribed by the Merchant Navy Training Board (MNTB, 2017) utilises a combination of Higher Education (HE) and industry placement to fast-track cadets into jobs as officers. Experienced seafarers can utilise their experience, in combination with HE to become officers. Safety culture for those with managerial responsibilities, such as those that merchant navy cadets are preparing for, can benefit from an appreciation of the role of people within complex systems – understanding how and why people get things wrong (Reason, 1990). This can form a foundation for understanding how to shape the shipboard safety culture. Understanding the role of humans in complex systems can help us to learn better lessons from accidents and near misses (Dekker, 2017). Understanding how organisational drift (Beerman & Ackroyd, 2006) can corrode safety over time (Anand, 2017) can equip students to take measures to ask the difficult questions that may make the difference between success and failure. With that in mind, this action-research project had the aim of evaluating the effectiveness of various teaching
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