M.Sc. Project

This study assessed the knowledge and safety practices among teachers of public schools in the Emirate of Sharjah, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The UAE's education system is relatively new, and for the past decade, the UAE's school system has been the subject of academic debate. As a young system, it has faced various challenges and has progressed mostly due to the government's significant support.

 However, occupational accidents are common in educational institutions, although legal regulations for occupational accident prevention are within the framework of occupational health and safety. The number of accidents is increasing in educational facilities. Therefore, in order to avoid accidents and injuries, staff members and students should follow all safety laws and guidelines in the school. Safety awareness refers to employees' perceptions and assessments of their own abilities and responsibilities for avoiding risks at work. This study evaluated the level of awareness among the teachers regarding occupational health and safety related to educational institutions and investigates the efficiency of the safety training process imparted by the stakeholders for the teachers and the extent to which the schools in Sharjah are applying and committed to the safety standards, policies, and procedures. The cross-sectional study design was utilized in this study which covered public schools in the Emirate of Sharjah, UAE. The data was collected from 271 respondents using an online questionnaire prepared in English, Arabic, and Chinese languages, which is a 100 percent response rate was achieved in this study.

The results revealed that more than 90% of the respondents had strong knowledge and practice of health and safety processes and procedures in their workplace, specifically teachers. The results revealed that 97.5% of respondents acknowledge the importance of health and safety in schools, the statistical results indicated that gender is a significant factor, evidenced by a low p-value below the critical threshold (p<0.05).

95.1% of participants agree that they can recognize and identify all risks associated with any activity conducted in school. There are few respondents who either expressed uncertainty or disagreed with this statement. This high percentage of agreement suggests a strong perception among the participants regarding their ability to assess and understand risks in their professional environment, and probability values for assessing participants' ability to recognize and identify risks associated with school activities, all sociodemographic factors, including gender, show no statistical significance, but at different degrees of freedom and Chi-square values. Another result indicates that 95.9% of respondents agree that safety information is shared regularly by safety specialists, the gender of respondents shows statistical significance regarding whether safety specialists regularly share safety information in the school (p<0.05). This implies that gender does influence the perception of the regularity with which safety information is disseminated. A total of 97.2 percent agree on reporting any incident or accident. This indicates a strong commitment from students and employees to ensure the well-being of others by actively reporting incidents or accidents within the school environment, work experience shows a significant influence on the importance of reporting occupational accidents and incidents with p- value (p<0.05). In the results a 97.2% of respondents agree that there is a commitment from students and employees towards adhering to health and safety standards in the school, and probability values for evaluating participants' commitment to health and safety standards, policies, and procedures in all processes. Based on the results, the work experience of respondents shows a p-value less than 0.05, indicating that there is a strong relationship between this sociodemographic parameter and commitment to health and safety standards.