The Onguard Safety Tests require a high level of literacy which is unnecessary in the examination of students understanding of safe practice. For many students this poses a significant challenge. Teachers undertaking practical subjects often attract and support students with lower literacy skills, giving them an opportunity to flourish in an educational environment. It is extremely important that we support this and build our students confidence.

As the current OnGuard system stands, the method of questioning, multiple choice answers, and "lockout" function do not support our lower literacy and/or ability students. We therefore propose several positive changes.

1. Multiple choice answers such as "this is a true and correct statement" should be adjusted to a more simplified version of "true". 

2. Questions should be phrased in a way that is student centred, asking direct questions. For example "Do you need to wear safety glasses when operating a drill press?" Followed by a concise multiple choice option of true/false.

3. Remove the 10min lockout for students who answer 2 questions wrong. In a classroom setting this lockout is incredibly disheartening for students, interrupts the learning cycle, and for many classes leads to behaviour management issues.

4. Allow teachers to access PDF documentation of the safety information provided alongside the tests so that they may explicitly teach the safety information to be tested, prior to testing.

We ask for these changes respectfully, and wishing to continue our support of the OnGuard Safety testing system.