ABSTRACT
Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) improvement, requires people to receive OSH education in formal educational and vocational settings, as well as during their professional careers, for example, in the form of “on the job training”.
Enforcement of OSH laws in workplace settings has a direct correlation to both management’s and workers’ level of Safety education and know-how. In any Safety Management System (SMS), Safety education is a key component for the successful implementation of the SMS.
To successfully integrate safety into mainstream formal education systems, various approaches may be followed, such as the holistic approach, that is, the integration of safety issues in school curricula, the safety within course syllabi approach, not limiting OSH education to any one single subject, and the safety via the work environment approach, especially suited to students in technical and vocational programmes. Careful combination and optimization of the above methods in a formal educational system will yield the best results, as various real-life examples show.
