Risk management for teachers combines proactive strategies around classroom safety, documentation, and professional boundaries with a fallback plan of personal liability insurance.
Doing your best to prevent accidents and having your own teacher liability insurance are critical to protecting your career. Many risks teachers face are entirely preventable. For those who aren’t, a personal insurance policy is there when prevention fails.
Get our top tips for teacher risk management below, plus download our free checklist to help you get started with your own risk management plan.
Get a Free Risk Management Checklist!
How to Manage Your Risks as a Teacher: Preventative Measures & Liability Insurance
Developing a teacher risk management plan involves four steps:
- Identification: Determine what risks you face as a teacher, both physical and professional
- Evaluation: Estimate how likely a risk is to occur and how severe the damage would be (e.g., roughly how much money could an accident cost you, or how badly could it harm your reputation?)
- Treatment: Stop doing the risk-causing behavior if you can, but mitigate where possible and transfer risk by getting educator insurance in case your plan fails
- Monitoring: Watch and see if risk management actions work (i.e., have any accidents occurred despite your best efforts?) and modify or update them as needed
Let’s take a closer look at what each of these steps entails.
1. Identification
Teacher risks fall into two categories: physical (like student injuries) and professional (like legal or reputational trouble). Most teachers face a combination of both types of risk. Knowing what these risks look like can help you develop a risk management plan that covers all your bases.
| Common Physical Risks | Common Professional Risks |
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2. Evaluation
Not every teacher faces the same risks. For instance, a teacher who never takes students on off-campus excursions or field trips doesn’t need to prevent accidents on those outings.
However, a teacher who does must consider how often they go on field trips, what could potentially go wrong there, and what the consequences might be. Could this harm you financially, reputationally, or both, and to what degree?
3. Treatment
Once you’ve evaluated the likelihood of a risk occurring and what it could potentially cost you, it’s time to come up with a plan to prevent it. This may mean stopping whatever is causing the risk in the first place, but generally it means finding ways to continue doing what you’re doing in a safer manner.
While you should always come up with your own treatment plan for each of the risks you’ve identified in your teaching career, here are several best practices and classroom safety tips to follow.
Physical Risk Management Tips
- Supervise students when they are playing or using equipment that could potentially injure them, such as spending time on a playground or handling lab materials for a science experiment
- Keep your classroom clean and free of clutter, with loose items secured away in cabinets and cables safely taped to the floor
- Store hazardous materials, such as cleaning supplies, out of reach in a locked cabinet
- Create and enforce strong anti-bullying policies in your classroom and teach students how to identify and report this behavior when they see it
- Remain calm when students are arguing to defuse the situation instead of escalating it
- Know and follow your school’s supervision ratios for recess, hallways, and transition periods
Professional Risk Management Tips
- Maintain a record of decisions, communications, and rationale for anything a parent or teacher might dispute (e.g., grades or accommodations)
- Avoid physical contact with students unless absolutely necessary (i.e., for safety reasons)
- Keep a detailed log of significant incidents that occur in or outside of your classroom (like a fight or accident), complete with information about who was involved and what time it happened
- Reserve communication with parents and students to school-sanctioned channels, not your personal email or phone number
- Set your social media profiles to private and don’t use them to connect with current students
It’s crucial to recognize that risk prevention is not a guarantee that nothing will go wrong. Accidents can still happen despite your best efforts. If they do, teacher liability insurance is the best way to protect yourself from the financial and reputational burden.
You may receive limited coverage under your school or district policy, but it’s primarily there to protect them — not you. Plus, school policies typically don’t cover off-campus or after-school incidents. All teachers need their own insurance designed to shield them from the cost of an accident or lawsuit.
4. Monitoring
Part of any solid plan is taking the time to make sure it’s working as intended, and risk management is no different. Monitoring is an ongoing process to work on throughout the year, taking stock of which risk management strategies have prevented accidents from happening and which haven’t.
Never hesitate to tweak your risk management plan as needed. A good rule of thumb is that if any aspect of your job duties changes (e.g., you’re teaching a new grade level or managing an after-school program), reevaluate the risks you face and restart the process.
Managing risks takes work, but it’s worth it to avoid accidents that could harm your livelihood and your reputation. Grab a copy of our free risk management checklist below to get started.
Get a Free Risk Management Checklist!
Examples of Education Risk Management
Let’s take a closer look at what risk management might look like for various teachers, including how liability insurance can come in clutch if preventative measures aren’t enough.
All policies have conditions, limitations, and exclusions — review your policy for exact details. Claim scenarios vary, and similar claims do not guarantee coverage.
Physical Injury Risk
Marina teaches second grade and has a few high-energy students in her class. While on recess duty, one of her students climbs a fence marked off-limits, falls, and breaks his arm. His parents sue her, claiming she was negligent and could’ve prevented the accident had she been paying closer attention.
| Risk Management Actions | Where Insurance Could Help |
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Digital Communication Risk
Daphne is a middle school algebra teacher who normally sticks to her school’s policy of only communicating with students and their parents through sanctioned platforms. However, she uses her personal phone “just this once” to conveniently touch base with a struggling student.
A late-night text about a make-up assignment gets screenshotted and shared out of context in a parent Facebook group, implying inappropriate familiarity.
| Risk Management Actions | Where Insurance Could Help |
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Reputational Risk
Jacob is a beloved high school band teacher. After one student’s exceptional performance during their flute solo in the winter concert, he pats her on the back to congratulate her.
A few weeks later, the school district opens an investigation into Jacob’s conduct with students after receiving a complaint from the girl’s parent that he engaged in inappropriate physical contact with her. There are no witnesses to back him up, as the interaction took place in private after the concert.
| Risk Management Actions | Where Insurance Could Help |
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Crisis Risk
Priya is an elementary special education teacher trained in de-escalating crisis situations. When a student is in distress, she uses the proper restraint technique to prevent the student from hurting themselves or others. However, the student’s parents allege that Priya used excessive force and sue her for damages.
| Risk Management Actions | Where Insurance Could Help |
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Instructional Error Risk
Tomas has been teaching AP English for 20 years, and his students (and their parents) tend to be very conscientious about test scores and their impact on college admissions. One of his students does poorly on the AP test and doesn’t get into the English program at her desired university. Her parents sue him, claiming he did not properly prepare her for the test.
| Risk Management Actions | Where Insurance Could Help |
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Learn more about what teacher insurance is designed to cover and how it can help protect you from common claims.
Complete Your Teacher Risk Management Plan With the Right Coverage
Risk management is key to stopping preventable accidents, but some things are beyond your control. That’s why the final layer of risk management is always your own liability insurance coverage, not your school’s. It can help cover what your district’s policy doesn’t: incidents that happen after hours, off-campus, or online, as well as personal allegations against you.
Building a risk management plan is the hard part, but backing it up with your own teacher liability insurance? That’s easy. Get coverage online today from Insurance Canopy for as low as $21.08 per month.
FAQs About Risk Management for Teachers
What Is Risk Management in Education?
Managing education-related risks is a twofold process:
- Taking steps to prevent accidents from happening after identifying physical and professional risks
- Getting a teacher liability insurance policy to help cover expenses when risk prevention isn’t enough
What Is a School Risk Management Plan?
Schools develop their own risk management plans to address potential hazards and protect themselves from liability. For example, they often require teachers to take turns supervising recess to ensure students aren’t engaging in risky behaviors.
Even though your school has its own risk management plan, you need your own as well. School safety policies can prevent accidents from happening in your classroom, but you typically need to expand on those to create a plan that covers all of your bases.
Does My School’s Policy Cover Me Personally?
While you may receive some protection from your school’s liability insurance, it’s important to remember that the policy is there to protect them, first and foremost. These policies often won’t cover incidents that occur off-campus, after-school, or online, as well as any allegations you may face. That’s why having your own educator insurance or tutor insurance is critical.
Learn more about what school policies don’t cover and why you should always have your own coverage.
JoAnne Hammer | Program Manager
JoAnne Hammer is the Program Manager for Insurance Canopy. She has held the prestigious Certified Insurance Counselor (CIC) designation since July 2004.
JoAnne understands that starting and operating a business takes a tremendous amount of time, dedication, and financial resources. She believes that insurance is the single best way to protect your investment, business, and personal assets.
JoAnne Hammer is the Program Manager for Insurance Canopy. She has held the prestigious Certified Insurance Counselor (CIC) designation since July 2004.
JoAnne understands that starting and operating a business takes a tremendous amount of time, dedication, and financial resources. She believes that insurance is the single best way to protect your investment, business, and personal assets.
