Young Person Risk Assessment: 9 Duties That Change When a Worker Is Under 18
Every summer, law firms take on vacation scheme students, insurers run school-leaver intakes, software businesses bring in apprentices, and universities place students with employers who have never hosted one. A good proportion of those people are seventeen.
At that point a different legal regime applies, and it applies before their first day rather than after it. Most organisations discover this in the second week, when someone asks whether the new apprentice should be using the guillotine.
The duties are not onerous and the regime is not obscure. It is simply separate from the general risk assessment everybody already has, and it contains one absolute rule, one prescribed list and one requirement to contact a parent. Here are the nine things that change.
1. The assessment must exist before they start
This is the hard edge, and it catches employers who would otherwise be compliant.
Regulation 3(4) of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 provides that an employer shall not employ a young person unless it has made or reviewed an assessment in relation to risks to the health and safety of young persons. Not shall assess promptly. Shall not employ.
So the sequence is fixed. Offer, assessment, start date. An organisation that onboards a seventeen-year-old on Monday and writes the assessment on Thursday was in breach on Monday, regardless of how good the Thursday document turns out to be.
2. Seven prescribed matters must be taken into account
Regulation 3(5) does not leave the content to judgement. It requires particular account to be taken of the inexperience, lack of awareness of risks and immaturity of young persons; the fitting-out and layout of the workplace and the workstation; the nature, degree and duration of exposure to physical, biological and chemical agents; the form, range and use of work equipment and the way it is handled; the organisation of processes and activities; the extent of health and safety training provided or to be provided; and risks from agents, processes and work listed in the Annex to the European directive on the protection of young people at work.
That last one is the limb nobody reads. The annex to Directive 94/33/EC is referenced directly by UK law and remains the reference point for what counts as a prescribed risk. An assessment that does not engage with it has missed a statutory requirement, not an optional refinement.
3. Some work is prohibited outright
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Regulation 19(2) prohibits employing a young person for work beyond their physical or psychological capacity, work involving harmful exposure to toxic or carcinogenic agents including those harmful to genetic health or to an unborn child, work involving harmful exposure to radiation, work involving a risk of accidents that cannot reasonably be assumed to be recognised or avoided because of inexperience, inattention or lack of training, and work with a risk to health from extreme cold or heat, noise or vibration.
Read limb (d) carefully, because it is the one that applies in offices rather than in heavy industry. A task is prohibited not because it is dangerous in the abstract but because a person without experience or training cannot be expected to spot the risk. The guillotine in the print room and the solvent in the prototyping bench are the obvious cases. Working alone in a building out of hours is the one people miss.
4. There is a training exception, and it has three conditions
Apprenticeships would be impossible if regulation 19(2) were absolute, and it is not.
Regulation 19(3) permits the employment of a young person who is no longer a child for work in those categories where it is necessary for their training, where they will be supervised by a competent person, and where any risk will be reduced to the lowest level that is reasonably practicable. All three, together.
The middle condition is the operative one. Supervision by someone who happens to be senior is not supervision by a competent person, and an apprentice placed with a team that has no named supervisor for safety purposes does not meet the exception however good the training plan is.
5. If they are still of school age, you must tell a parent
The duty that surprises almost every employer, and the one most often discovered by an inspector rather than by a policy.
Regulation 10(2) requires an employer, before employing a child, to provide the child's parent or guardian with comprehensible and relevant information on the risks identified by the assessment, the preventive and protective measures, and the risks notified by other employers sharing the workplace. A letter or email to the parent, before the start date, covering what the assessment found and what you are doing about it.
Separately, employing a school-age child engages local authority rules on permits and permitted hours, summarised in the government's guidance on child employment. Work experience placements arranged through a school usually handle that, and should not be assumed to.
6. Working time rules are different, and the opt-out does not apply
Young workers sit outside the adult working time framework in several respects, which matters for any business where people stay late as a matter of culture.
The Working Time Regulations 1998 treat young workers separately: regulation 5A deals with the limit on their working time, and regulation 6A with night work, including an entitlement to a free assessment of health and capacities before being assigned to it. Daily and weekly rest entitlements and rest breaks are also more generous than the adult position, and the individual opt-out that applies to the adult weekly limit is not available to young workers.
An intern who cannot lawfully agree to work the hours the team around them works is a scheduling issue, not a cultural one, and it needs to be settled before the placement starts.
7. Supervision and training are pitched at inexperience, not at the task
Regulation 19(1) requires every employer to ensure that young persons employed by them are protected at work from any risks to their health or safety which are a consequence of their lack of experience, absence of awareness of existing or potential risks, or the fact that they have not yet fully matured.
In practice this reframes induction. The standard induction tells people what the hazards are. For a young worker it also has to cover what to do when something is unclear, who to ask, and the explicit permission to stop and say no. Seventeen-year-olds in a professional environment are strongly disinclined to question an instruction from someone senior, and an induction that does not address that has not addressed the actual risk.
8. On placements, the split has to be written down
Work experience and student placements involve at least two organisations and sometimes three, and the duty does not sit neatly with any of them by default.
The host controls the workplace. The school, college or university arranged the placement. An agency may be the employer. Someone has to own the assessment, the induction, the supervision and the incident reporting route, and the only reliable way to settle it is in writing before the placement begins. This is the same structural problem that catches professional firms placing their own people on client sites, and it fails for the same reason: each party assumes a wider scope than it holds.
9. Review when anything changes
The assessment is tied to the work, the person and the setting, so it needs revisiting when any of those moves. A change of department part-way through a placement, a new piece of equipment, a move to a different floor, or the young person turning eighteen.
That last one is worth a diary entry. The specific young-person duties fall away at eighteen, and keeping restrictions in place afterwards without reason is as poor a practice as never having applied them.
The nine on one page
| Duty | Source | What usually goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Assess before employment begins | MHSWR reg 3(4) | Assessment written after the start date |
| Take account of seven prescribed matters | MHSWR reg 3(5) | The directive annex limb never considered |
| Do not employ for prohibited work | MHSWR reg 19(2) | Limb (d) read as industrial only |
| Apply the training exception properly | MHSWR reg 19(3) | No named competent supervisor |
| Inform the parent of a school-age child | MHSWR reg 10(2) | Nobody knew the duty existed |
| Apply young worker working time rules | Working Time Regs, incl. regs 5A and 6A | Intern works the hours the team works |
| Pitch supervision at inexperience | MHSWR reg 19(1) | Standard induction used unchanged |
| Allocate duties on placements in writing | Contract and arrangement | Three parties, no owner |
| Review on change, including turning 18 | MHSWR reg 3 | Assessment never revisited |
Our health and safety audits in professional and education settings find rows one, five and six open far more often than anything else, and all three are cheap to close before a placement season rather than during it. The HSE's material for young workers is the right starting point for the UK position.
What changes abroad, and it is usually stricter
Groups that extend a UK approach across Europe under-comply, because the UK sits at the permissive end of a directive several member states implemented well above the floor.
Directive 94/33/EC sets the European minimum on working time, night work, rest and prohibited work for young people, and it is the source of the annex UK law points back to. Germany goes considerably further through the Jugendarbeitsschutzgesetz, which prescribes hours and prohibited activities in detail and requires a medical examination before a young person starts employment, with follow-ups afterwards. There is no UK equivalent of that pre-employment medical, so a British group placing an apprentice in a German entity on UK assumptions has missed a condition of lawful employment rather than a best-practice step.
France operates its own regime with a formal derogation procedure for certain work by minors in training, so the paperwork exists in advance or the work does not happen. One group methodology works, one group answer does not, and that is where global health and safety consultants earn their place. Keeping the assessments, supervisor names, parental notifications and review dates in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more in combination than either alone, particularly for an intake of forty placements across six countries in the same eight weeks.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite has spent 15+ years helping employers run placement and apprenticeship intakes without discovering the young person regime halfway through one. We support 1,500+ businesses in 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with legal, insurance, education and office clients, where the summer intake and the student placement are the two points this becomes urgent.
For multi-country groups, our international health and safety consultants can tell you which jurisdictions require a medical, a permit or a derogation before a young person starts, which is the kind of thing better established in March than in July.
Check the start dates for your next intake, then check whether the assessments exist yet. Then book a free gap analysis and we will tell you in one call what has to be in place first.
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Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
