Safety Balanced Scorecard (Bsc) Framework For Benchmarking The Safety Performance Of Saudi Schools

Abstract

There are increasing efforts to increase the safety performance of education environments and facilities in developing and newly industrialised countries. In recent years, Saudi Arabia has increased its commitment to reducing accident rates related to poor safety practices. However, there still lacks an integrated and holistic approach to the evaluation of safety performance in their school environments. The well-established balanced scorecard (BSC) framework developed by Kaplan and Norton offers a suitable and robust framework that captures both the lead and lag indicators of business performance. The BSC framework also has good adaptability to different areas where a holistic evaluation is required such as safety management. In this study the authors utilised their prior developed safety performance BSC to benchmark the safety performance of Saudi Schools. The safety performance benchmarking exercise included 200 respondents representing16 male and female schools across the five salient BSC perspectives, including: P1: Safety Management and Leadership (5 factors); P2: Safety Learning and Training (3 Factors); P3: Safety Policy, Procedures and Processes (3 Factors); P4: Workforce Safety Culture (3 Factors); and P5: Safety Performance (3 Factors). A macro level as well as comparative assessment between schools is presented. The safety performance BSC framework and associated evaluation process presented in this paper has implications for benchmarking Saudi schools, with the aim to monitor and improve their safety performance over the long-term.