Tag: outdoor pursuits

Carrying on where we left off yesterday... click here “Adventure sports bring considerable health benefits, both physical and psychological, and this is now fairly common knowledge. Even in relation to children, the educational benefits of adventure activities are coming to be widely accepted.” The coalition Government is planning to abolish the Adventure Activities Licensing Authority, set up after the 1993 Lyme Bay tragedy in which four teenagers died while sea kayaking. The authors say the act that set up AALA was an overreaction and disproportionate. However, when seven members of the Association of Heads of Outdoor Education Centres were surveyed on how the regulatory regime operates, there was an overwhelmingly positive attitude to AALA. Virtually all the respondents agreed the quality of outdoor centres had been improved by the AALA regime, particularly ‘at the lower end’. They point out that AALA conducts inspection by the specialist sector but answerable to Government, as opposed to inspection by the sector and answerable to the sector, which is likely to be the position after its abolition. Public Safety and Risk Assessment argues strongly in favour of a concept called risk benefit analysis. This tries to weigh up a tolerance of some risks, in exchange for the benefits of the activity, with the public taking back some degree of responsibility for their own actions. This, it says, is designed to manage risk while properly looking after the public’s safety and health and welfare. Risk benefit analysis is certainly not without difficulties. Balancing the disadvantages of risks with the advantages of the activities is like comparing apples and pears and the authors freely admit it is not easy. Establishing risk benefit analysis as an acceptable widespread procedure will entail pitting traditional analysis of risk against a more intuitive evaluation of benefits using developing knowledge and