At the moment with the extra COVID hand washing and winter chills, children are returning from school with cracked bleeding hands.

The school's current policy says that they cannot bring hand creams to school unless prescribed by a doctor or chemist. The policy was created to try and abide by Safeguarding principles (i.e. proactively protect the children from harm), but as you can see from the image it actually fails to meet any of the 6 official principles of Safeguarding.

The current policy wastes critical NHS resources and ensures actual harm to our children in the name of protecting them from possible future harm (the risk of allergies or injury if creams are shared or played with). Harm we can remove by adjusting the policy to allow only specific creams.

This is not a national or LEA policy, it is a policy invented by the School Governors and can be changed by them.

We want the school governors to amend the current policy to approve kids bringing their own over-the-counter hand cream from a pre-approved list of over the counter hypoallergenic brands. If they are hypoallergenic they cannot cause harm, and nor do they need to be applied in a specific way, or a specific amount, so the argument requiring a prescription is invalid. 

Please sign if you support this small change.